SPN/Firefly Fic: And I Think It's Gonna Be A Long, Long Time
Title: And I Think It's Gonna Be A Long, Long Time
Characters: Dean Winchester, Simon Tam, River Tam, Mal Reynolds, Kaylee Frye, Jayne Cobb
Genres: Crossover (Supernatural/Firefly), gen
Word-count: 2659
Rating: R for language
Spoilers: Supernatural 7.03 and 7.23; no specific Firefly spoilers
Summary: Purgatory isn't what Dean expected. It's full of crazy astronauts, for one thing. Oh, and it's called Serenity.
Notes: Written for mad_server's prompt at her gorgeous S7 Finale Dean H/C Meme. Title, if it wasn't obvious, from Elton John's “Rocket Man.”
His lungs give out around the fifth hour.
As the haze that's been hovering around his eyes for the past two hours wraps him close and smothers him to the ground, he tries at least to tuck his limbs into some kind of defensive crouch. It's more instinct than reason, because all it's going to do is force the long-legged something a few yards behind to spend a few extra minutes ripping through his back on its way to his liver.
Somethings, of course, he corrects himself - not something. It didn't take him long to learn that in this whole stinking place, he's the only thing that's alone.
At least, he reflects as he struggles to locate a last lungful of oxygen, he's not going to get eaten by anyone he knows. Whatever the things following him are, he's pretty sure he's never seen them before. He doesn't even know what name to give them.
If he didn't know better, he'd say killer astronauts.
His brain's sufficiently fried that he's about to say it anyway when his forehead connects decisively with the bare ground.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Whatever they are, they've got voices.
He wasn't expecting that, but then he's seen a lot tonight that he wasn't expecting.
They're chatty sons of bitches, too, and what he can't understand is why. He wants to ask them to shut up and get on with the disemboweling.
“He ain't breathing,” one of them says, and he's not sure how that's relevant when he's about to end up as a pile of leather and guts stuck to the iron-hard floor of Purgatory. Breathing, at this point, is pretty much a thing of the past.
Then his face is pressing into something solid and heavy, and he realizes that Purgatory smells, for reasons his spent brain can't begin to fathom, like motor oil.
He feels his eyes coming apart against the greasy fabric as he topples forward into darkness again.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
When he finally blinks awake, he learns two things.
One, that Purgatory is blue and smells like a fucking supply cabinet.
Two, that he's still, quite inexplicably, alive.
“He's awake,” somebody outside his line of vision says - a girl, and her voice she sounds like she's saying it around a smile.
He doesn't have a chance to tell her it's rude to laugh at nearly-dead guys before his eyes are being violated with thumbs and a fucking brutal penlight.
“Unevenly dilated,” the owner of the thumbs remarks placidly, and Dean tries to find his knee so he can shove it into the guy's chest. He can tell it's somewhere underneath the scratchy blanket that's draped over his body, but his muscles aren't cooperating with the attack strategy.
The light switches off, and he blinks up into an even bigger one, framing the head of a young man with neat dark hair, who doesn't look like any kind of monster Dean's ever known. He looks, actually, like a total prick.
“How are you feeling?” the prick asks him, but Dean didn't come to Purgatory to play twenty questions with a guy in a fucking vest, so he ignores the question and cranes his head around to look at the rest of the room.
He's lying in the middle of some kind of clinic - not a lot different from the ones he and Sam have gone to sometimes when a claw cuts too deep and their sewing skills aren't quite up to the job. A lot bluer, but other than that, familiar. It even smells like the clinics he knows - faintly bloody and sick with disinfectant.
He turns to the left, and sees the girl.
She's perched cross-legged on the counter, which he's pretty sure goes against hygienic practice, and - sure enough - she's smiling. He's bad at guessing ages, but he'd reckon this girl isn't quite legal yet, and right now she looks like a kid who's just been given a new puppy.
“You're not supposed to be here,” she scolds, leaning forward and grinning like they're in on some big secret together, and he can't help snorting at that, even though it sends a shock of pain through his whole body.
“You're tellin' me, sister.”
“You shouldn't chase things in the woods. Might get hurt, running with bloody bones.” She fucking giggles then. “Caught in your own trap, hunter.”
He stiffens. “Christo,” he croaks across the room, but she just raises her eyebrows and replies with something long and unintelligible in Latin.
From the expression on her face, she's probably calling him names, but he relaxes anyway: whoever these people are, at least they're not demons. He's about to ask what the fuck's up with the skinny chick when a voice at the door interrupts him.
“Oh, he's awake?” For some reason, the voice sounds familiar, but he can't put his finger on why until he flops back over and faces the girl beaming in the open doorway.
“Why didn't you tell me?” Amy Pond asks, and it's Purgatory after all, and Dean rolls over and pukes helplessly onto the floor.
The last thing he sees before blacking out again is his own vomit hitting the inside of the metal bowl someone thrusts up against his face.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The second time he wakes up, he's in an actual bed for a change, and nobody says good morning by blinding him.
Things in Purgatory are looking up, all right.
They've changed color, too - the tiny room they've stuffed him into glows yellow from lamps on the wall; the door looks thin enough to let more soft amber light through from outside. He tries to get an elbow up underneath him to have a look at the rest of the room (cell?), but hands grab him from behind and push him back onto the hard pillows. At some point, he's going to have to talk to these folks about their obsession with sitting just out of eyeshot.
“Doc says you ain't supposed to sit up yet,” the hands say. For the sake of argument, and because his head's already started a fairly unpleasant swooping sensation, Dean lets them shove him awkwardly down. That done, he swivels his neck to catch a glimpse of the latest lurker.
He's older than the last one, and there's no vest, which Dean takes as a good sign. Instead, he's wearing suspenders over a bright red shirt, and an intently sullen look that reminds Dean of Sam in the days when he wouldn't talk, just ran away and drank himself almost to literal Hell. It's not a memory that he expected or particularly wanted to resurface right now, and he kicks it away stubbornly.
“You drew the short straw?” he guesses conversationally. His voice sounds like someone else's, and it hurts to talk, but he prefers the feeling of industrial sandpaper on his windpipe to the silence. “Stuck watching the prisoner?” The grumpy guy clears his throat.
“Seems there's folks on this boat ain't got an interest in nursemaiding. Surely found a mess of powerful important things needed doing when the doc asked for volunteers.” He eyes Dean coolly. “And you ain't a prisoner. Not yet.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Means your name didn't come up on the cortex. We found the ident card in your pocket, and there ain't any Dean Winchester on record. Means you don't exist, and in my experience folks that don't exist usually turn out to be a heap more dangerous than the regular kind.” He leans forward, smiling broadly in the same way Dean's seen demons smile right before the eyes turn. “You care explaining why it is you've never been born?”
Dean thinks he might have a better chance of answering the question if he could be sure of all the words in it. Or if his head didn't feel like it was considering melting all over the pillow. He chooses to ignore the question altogether, and settles for narrowing down the nature of the trouble he's staring at.
“Christo,” he mutters, and watches the guy's face for the telltale flicker of black. There's nothing, though, and he gives up.
“Where am I?”
“You're on my ship, and I'm asking you why you ain't real. I'd appreciate an answer, unless you want me to dump your sorry ass on the first rock we come to.”
“I didn't see any ocean.”
“Less jokes, more explanin'.”
Dean's not sure why that's a joke, but he lets it go. “I'm not supposed to be here.” Somebody else said that, and he can't remember who. Cas? He swallows that particular lump down, throat aching. “We dragged the Leviathans back in, and they… ” He shrugs, fighting down the frantic loneliness that comes with the realization. “They dragged us with them.”
“Did you say Alliance?”
“What alliance?”
“That dragged you here.”
“Leviathans,” Dean enunciates hoarsely, closing his eyes. His first impression was that the light in here was dim, but he's beginning to have second thoughts. “Big ugly sons-a-guns with teeth and - ” He breaks off and takes a deep breath, because his stomach's set on reminding him that it's not quite empty yet, and he's not taking any chances this time.
Before Suspenders can repeat his question for the fourth time, there's the sound of a door sliding open beyond the foot of Dean's bed, and a voice that vaguely registers as familiar demands, “I thought I told you to let him rest.”
“Just makin' friendly conversation.”
“He's suffering from a serious concussion. He doesn't need conversation.” Dean's inclined to agree, but the redshirt evidently sees things differently.
“That's as may be. I still need to know why he ain't showing up on the cortex.”
“Mal, we're as far from civilized territory as it's possible to get. We're straddling the edge of nowhere. If he isn't showing up, it's because the Alliance doesn't keep records on the farthest reaches of the galaxy.”
“Or because he's running from something - and I don't intend to set whatever it is on our tail.”
“Well, you can ask him all you want when he's not suffering from a head injury and near-suffocation.”
Dean waits for Mal to come up with another snappy argument, but instead he hears a quiet huff of breath, and footsteps leading to the door. As it slips shut, a hand descends on Dean's forehead, gently pulling his eyelids back one at a time before leaving him in the darkness again.
Lurking and face-grabbing. It's a thing with these people, and he wishes they'd stop.
“How's your head feeling?” the doctor asks, and the answer to that is awful, thanks, but Dean's got a question of his own.
“You said farthest reaches of the galaxy,” he whispers, because his voice seems to have jumped ship. “He said boat.” Something's crawling up his throat, burning in the corners of his eyes, and he suddenly can't breathe. “Where the hell am I?” he demands in the most authoritative voice he can manage from his wrecked lungs.
“Serenity,” the voice says, and before he can ask for a straight fucking answer, a sudden jab in his arm sucks him into sleep.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
He wakes up in the same close yellow room, and decides he's had enough of unconsciousness.
This time, he's alone, which is nice. It means there's nobody there to see him trip over his own legs getting out of bed. He untangles the sheet from his ankles and stands up, and this time the spinning slows down after a few minutes.
He tugs open the surprisingly weightless door and squints out into a shady hallway. Wincing as his chest remembers slowly how full breaths work, he slips through the doorway and down the hall towards a set of metal stairs leading up to a higher level of the ship. He stumbles across the raised threshold at the top of the stairs, and turns toward the sound of laughter.
He finds them in a room that smells of tomatoes and cinnamon. They're sitting around a long table eating something that looks like oatmeal out of mismatched wooden bowls, and there are at least twice as many of them as he thought. The doctor and the crazy girl are next to each other at the far end of the table, and he can see the back of Mal's shirt in the chair closest to him, but there are people here he hasn't seen yet, including an older man who looks like some kind of priest and a guy in a freaking Hawaiian shirt with bleached hair even stupider than Sam's.
And then there's Amy.
She's the first one to see him when he leans uncertainly against the open steel door - but even as her eyes widen and the table falls silent, he can see that it isn't really her. The hair's different, and this girl doesn't have the tired eyes he can still see going yellow and frozen on that motel mattress.
She beams at him like she's been waiting all evening for the dangerous nonexistent stranger to show up at the dinner table still smelling of his own puke, and gestures to an empty chair.
“We saved you a place.”
“Thought we were keepin' him locked up,” someone objects from farther down the table, but not-Amy frowns in his direction.
“Of course not,” she protests, appealing to the rest of the table. “Right, Cap'n?” Cap'n seems to be Mal, because Dean sees the red shoulders shrug and hears him mutter something noncommittal in reply. Not-Amy seems to take it as an emphatic affirmative, and turns back to the other guy, who's busy cramming two pieces of bread into his mouth at once. “See, Jayne?”
Incapacitated by bread, the guy settles for a mumble and a glare.
Not-Amy beckons to Dean again, rattling the chair beside her as if to get his attention. “C'mon,” she says, “we don't bite or nothin'. Not even Jayne,” she insists as the guy in the parrot shirt opens his mouth.
“You sure about that?” There's half a million things these people could be, flowery kitchen or not, and the vast majority of those come with fangs. But she doesn't seem to understand, just smiles some more and gets up to pull him over to the table.
And he has to admit, it's nice. Someone's built a fort of candles in the middle of the table, and he can feel the warmth from his seat, enough to make him realize he's been shivering. They offer him a dish of the fake oatmeal, but he's not hungry. The old guy murmurs something about tea and vanishes behind the long counter, and a few minutes later somebody puts a chipped blue mug in front of him. Sipping the scalding caramel-colored liquid, Dean gives up on keeping track of the recital of names and faces the girl's holding for him (her name's Kaylee, not Amy, and that's all he remembers), and closes his eyes. For a long time, he nods into the darkness, listening to the unfamiliar voices laugh and chatter around him like a swarm of friendly birds.
Then his body sways unexpectedly to the left and his cheek meets Kaylee's shoulder, and he smells it again: the familiar scent that dragged him out of Purgatory and into this place, wherever or whatever it is. She smells like cheap soap, and engine grease.
Like home.