DA/SPN Fanfic: Ghosts of the Past (6/11)
Title: Ghosts of the Past
Author: poestheblackcat
Rating: PG-13
Crossover: Dark Angel/Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Max/Alec-ish, Sam, Dean
Warning/Spoilers: Both Seasons of DA, up to Season 3 finale of SPN
Summary: Seattle 2022. Alec runs into Ben's ghost, or is he simply going crazy like his twin? Alec discovers the world of ghost hunting via supernatural hunters Sam and Dean Winchester.
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters belong to their respective owners.
AN: Not too much Alec in this chapter, a little more Max and Logan, but mostly Sam and Dean. Hey, Alec got a whole chapter to himself, so I figured the Winchesters needed some time to show off their researching skills. A lot of talk and not too much of action. Sorry.
Ghosts of the Past
Chapter 6
After a minute or so of collective contemplation, Logan broke the painful silence. Clearing his throat, he announced, “Dinner’s ready.”
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While they all dined on the meal of spaghetti with savory meatballs and salad that Logan had prepared for them (“dined” being a loose term for Dean wolfing his share down and asking for seconds, and Sam and Max picking at their plates), Sam and Dean told the rest their reason for being in Seattle.
The second priest to be taken was the son of a hunter friend of theirs killed on the job. The young priest gave the brothers shelter in his church whenever they passed through Seattle, and since they had been driving from a completed hunt near the Canadian border to a hunt in Oregon, they had decided to stop by for a visit. They’d been dismayed to learn that Father James Lawrence, known to the Winchesters and other close friends as Jimmy, had gone missing from his church the day before, apparently taken by force, judging from the damage done to the confessional.
After going over the church with an EMF meter, checking for any paranormal “fingerprints,” they concluded that the disappearance was indeed their “sort of thing.” There was no sulfur, no evidence of that this was supernatural other than that the meter had lit up like a Christmas tree and whined loud enough to earn steely glares from the small number of parishioners scattered throughout the church. Spirit.
They’d questioned the people there, fishing for anything that could help them with their new case. Discovering nothing they didn’t already know, the brothers had headed to the police station after seeing the news report on TV about the body of the young priest discovered the day before, reported missing three days before he was found, brutally murdered and mutilated. They’d flashed fake FBI badges to get more information on the case, but of course, they skipped that part in their story.
The “agents” were able to look at the files after a considerable amount of bribing. (“People aren’t as cheap as they used to be,” Dean griped. “Easier to buy, though.”) They found that there had been several more disappearances and subsequent discoveries of the mutilated and tattooed corpses of priests in different cities over the past few years, most of them after 2018 and stopping completely in 2020. Until now.
The recently found body had been the first in a little over two years and searches for the whereabouts of Father Lawrence were being conducted by the police, albeit very inefficiently and half-heartedly. The priest-nappings and killings were attributed to a serial killer. A suspect was caught in April of 2021, but mysteriously broke out of the holding cell soon after his arrest.
After finding all this out, they drove over to a nearby bar so that Dean could hustle up some money playing pool and Sam could look over the notes on the case. Pool was the only source of income the Winchesters had nowadays. Even Sam was known to remark wistfully that he missed the good old days of credit card scams. Credit cards had become obsolete in most places in America after the Pulse. Business these days was all done in cold, hard cash.
What had happened after they left the bar, they all knew. The Winchesters had run straight into the spirit they were looking for and had managed to save its next victims in the process.
“You know the interesting thing about this case is that you don’t really fit the spirit’s MO, Max,” Sam mused. “You’re the right age but you’re female and you’re not a priest. Alec isn’t a priest, either,” he said, ignoring Alec’s snort at this statement, “but he does fit the other aspects of the profile of the victims. Young, relatively fit males in their late teens, early twenties. And he already has a barcode. The profile is therefore also a description of Ben.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I think Ben was, in a way, killing himself over and over again, sacrificing himself to this Blue Lady. The barcodes he tattooed on the victims were his own, correct?”
Max indicated the affirmative. “Now, after hearing your story, I’m guessing that Ben was…” Sam paused, searching for the most sensitive word, “stopped in 2020 and that Alec was the one who got arrested last year.”
Alec nodded. “Damn right, I got arrested.” He frowned. “I always get blamed for things I didn’t do.” ‘Things that he did,’ passed unspoken through Max and Alec’s minds. “Maxie busted me out, though.” He smirked at her.
“It’s Max,” she growled.
Dean twitched a fond grin at the pair. “Better give it up, Max. He’ll never stop calling you ‘Maxie’.” Alec beamed smugly from his seat next to the irritated X5. “My brother’s been trying to get me to stop calling him ‘Sammy’ for the past twenty-five years and he still hasn’t succeeded. Ain’t that right, Sammy?”
Sam refused to rise to the bait. He cleared his throat. “As I was saying,” he said loudly, “Max doesn’t fit the profile, so I’m thinking that the reason the spirit wanted to kill her was because-”
“-because she was the person who caused his death,” Logan finished, getting caught up in this weird tale.
Sam nodded, body taut with the excitement of being on a hunt. “Right. So all we have to do now is find where he’s keeping Jimmy Lawrence and salt and burn Ben’s body. Do you have any idea where to start?”
“Salt and burn the body? So that explains the grave desecration charges on your police record,” Logan mused.
Alec arched his eyebrows incredulously at the hacker. “You went through his police record? Dude, you are a stalker.”
“Can we get back to this ghost dealio?” Max snapped. “Now, assuming Lydecker took Ben back to Manticore, the scientists there would have…” She gulped and took a deep breath and went on, “cut him open, and tried to figure out what went wrong, so that they could make sure it never happens again. Then I guess they’d salvage what they could for ‘spare parts’ to avoid wasting millions of dollars worth of government money.” The last sentence was spit out with venom.
“No,” Alec disagreed grimly. “No, they wouldn’t risk contaminating other X5s. They wouldn’t use the body for transplants. I’m pretty sure of that. They’d preserve it for studying, though. I assume it all burned up with everything else at the Manticore site when you let us all out, Max. I think even the freezer units were rigged with explosives so no evidence would be left of what they were doing there.”
Dean threw his napkin on the table after wiping his mouth and leaned back in his chair. “That’s just great. We’re right back at square one. How do we kill this sonofabitch if there’s no body to burn?” Max scowled at the term used to describe her brother, but said nothing.
“Maybe his spirit’s attached to something,” Sam said with furrowed brows. “We’ll have to find that and burn it.”
“What do you think it is?” Logan queried.
Sam sighed before answering. “I honestly don’t know. It could be anything, something he used frequently, something with a drop of his blood on it, a hair…”
Dean suddenly barked out a laugh. “Hey Sammy, remember that doll with the spirit’s hair? The little girl in the painting? Freaky ass doll. If anything freaks me out, it’s dolls. Dolls are scary, man.”
Sam smiled wryly at the memory. “Yeah, I remember alright. I was the one whose throat she was trying to slit.”
“What I don’t understand is why the killings started again.” Max stared down at her still almost full plate. “There was nothing for a whole two years until yesterday. Why now?”
Dean leaned forward, trying to catch her eyes. “Sometimes things happen that wake the spirit up, things like the demolition of a place special to them while they were still alive, you know, a disturbance,” he said, his tone serious now. “You know of anything like that happening?”
Max met his eyes and swallowed. “The forest where I …where he died. He used to take his victims there and hunt them down. There was a fire there last week.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah, that’s a good place to start. When exactly was this fire?”
“Six days ago, I think.” Logan looked at Max and Alec, who nodded their agreement. “It was blamed on a couple of teenagers playing with matches.”
Doing the calculations in his head, Sam said, “That’s about right. The first victim disappeared five days ago, the day right after the fire. I think that’s it.”
“And he was found yesterday.” Dean reiterated. “So the victim is killed three days after the kidnapping.”
Sam shook his head no. “Remember, Dean? The body was a day old. The young men are always killed two days after disappearing. When Ben was still alive, that was the rule he usually went by.”
Dean pursed his lips. “Right, so we need to find where old Benny boy’s keeping Jimmy. Since he was taken today, we have tomorrow and the day after to research.”
Sam rose from the table. “That’s good, since you need to rest, Dean. Head wounds are tricky. I’m gonna have to keep waking you up every hour, so we better turn in now.” He ignored Dean’s dramatic eye-rolling.
Logan nodded, rising as well, exoskeleton whirring. “The cot and everything is already set up in the guest room. Just go through that door and it’s the second door to your right.”
“Thanks,” Dean said, standing up and stretching. “Dinner was great. Best spaghetti I’ve had in years. The salad wasn’t bad, either, not too much like the rabbit food Sam’s always ordering.”
“Vegetables are not only for rabbits, Dean. They’re good for you,” Sam huffed. “Dean’s right about the pasta, though. It was great. Thank you for the dinner and the room,” he said smiling, turning to Logan.
Logan shook his head and returned his smile. “Like I said before, it’s not a problem. It’s the least I can do.”
Max and Alec said they also needed to get back to Terminal City. Sam told them to line the doorways and windows of their rooms with salt and showed them how to carve the various wards into the walls as he had here.
Dean handed Alec some salt rounds so that they would be protected if they got attacked on the way home but Max refused her share, saying she didn’t like guns. Dean’s response to that was a muttered, “Crazy chick, what kind of army girl hates guns?”
Exchanging good nights, the Winchesters retired to the guest room, arguing good-naturedly as they went.
“I get the bed, Sammy.”
“Yeah right. I’m taller than you. I won’t fit on the cot.”
“That’s ‘cause you’re a Sasquatch. I’m older. What I say goes.”
“Well, I’m not concussed, which means I’m thinking clearly.”
“Right, so since I’m injured, I should get the bed.”
“I…Jerk.”
“Bitch.”
Back in the dining room, Alec smirked. “I like Dean. He’s funny.”
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Later that night, Logan was awakened by a sudden cry from the guest room.
“Saaaaaam!”
It was guttural and filled with pain. He hastened into the wheelchair by his bed, not wanting to take the time to strap into the exoskeleton.
He wheeled himself into the Winchesters’ room as fast as he could. There, Logan found Sam at Dean’s bed, clutching his brother’s shoulders, calming him. “It’s just a dream, Dean. It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.”
Noticing Logan, Sam apologized. “Sorry if he woke you. He kind of gets nightmares when he’s concussed.”
Logan raised his eyebrows. “Are they always this bad?” he asked, eyeing the elder Winchester gasping for breath hunched over in his brother’s arms, sweat streaming down his face, which was twisted in a grimace.
Sam made a face. “Sometimes he won’t wake up. Look, I’m really sorry-”
“Let the man get back to bed, Sammy,” Dean interrupted, his voice raspy. He was still pale from what Logan could see from the weak moonlight that managed to stream into the room through the window, but his breaths were becoming more regular, and now that he was fully awake, he was pushing himself out of the compromising position in Sam’s arms.
Logan understood it for the dismissal that it was. Nodding, he said, “Okay. See you guys in the morning.”
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AN: An aftereffect of Dean’s time in Hell? Ooh! Angstiness galore!
Father Jimmy Lawrence is all mine, and is not related to any hunters we know from the show. His surname is an allusion to the boys’ hometown in Kansas.
What do you think Ben’s spirit is attached to? Can you guess? If you can, then I suck and I need to think of something harder.
Chapter 7