SPN/DA Crossover Fic: The Wellspring (2/?)
Title: The Wellspring
Author: scourgeofeurope
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rating: Ah, fuck. I just said fuck. I say fuck a lot. Is that considered an R or a PG-13 these days? One of those.
Summary: Sam and Dean find a tiny smartass in a barn in Montana. What are they to do?
Author's Notes: I wrote stuff. I demand patronizing pats on the back. <3
Previous chapters and more info can be found here.
____________________________
Chapter Two: Non-Alcoholic Wild Turkey
_______________________________
Alec is staring in the face of a wild turkey. It’s not like the chicken, though. With the chicken he was half-mad with starvation and only too happy to break the hen’s neck, tear the feathers out of the still-quivering body. This turkey is big and honestly, just a little bit scary. And Alec doesn’t feel like eating it.
He feels sick to his stomach. He’s never really felt sick to his stomach before. He’s felt his bones broken, his arms and legs clinically crushed and snapped. He’s felt a drill go into his skull, needles injected into every portion of his young skin.
But he’s never felt sick to his stomach.
It’s really kind of a weird sensation, he thinks. He feels it coming, and before he knows it, there’s a putrid mess flying out of his mouth and hitting the grass. He clutches his stomach and sobs. Tears run down his face. He remembers the last time he cried.
The last time he cried, one of the guards hit him in the face and told him to stop crying.
Alec stops crying. Soldiers don’t cry.
He smells it before he feels it. And he starts crying again.
The turkey watches him with doleful eyes as he strips off his already torn pants. He wants to tell it to stop looking at him. He wants to tell it that this has never happened before. He wants to tell it.
Alec doesn’t eliminate in his pants. Soldiers don’t shit themselves.
There’s blood in his stool and he bites his lip hard to stop himself from sobbing further. He tries to wipe them clean against the ground, but grass just sticks to the waste.
He wonders where the others are. He wonders if Ben made it over the fence.
Alec takes a moment to curse his own survival while another wave of nausea overtakes him. He pukes and shits. He stumbles, sobbing over to relatively cleaner grass and falls down, curls up.
He is naked and tiny and the weather is getting colder. The turkey doesn’t bother him. He’s glad he didn’t eat it. It’s food, but it doesn’t deserve to die. Not right now. Not when Alec isn’t hungry - not when Alec’s head is resting in a pool of his own vomit.
He shivers. He can’t stop shivering. He wonders where the others are. He wonders if Ben, if anybody, made it over the fence.
Salmonella.
Alec reaches over and fishes through his pants for the two wallets he lifted yesterday. Those two guys...Dean, the one who looked exactly like him. And Sam. Sam was the one who kept staring, blinking, unable to believe what was right in front of his eyes.
They had no idea, Alec realizes now. He opens a wallet, pulls out a driver’s license.
Sam Winchester is twenty-six years old.
He opens the other wallet.
Dean Winchester is thirty years old.
Brothers. Alec knows about brothers like he knows about sisters. He’d seen a sister take a bullet. He’d seen brothers run and run, evading the barrage of shots, hands on each other’s backs, pulling one another behind trees. It was like a free for all in the end there, but it wasn’t exactly like a free for all.
It was definitely a free for all for Alec. Alec isn’t a brother, has never been a brother. His unit isn’t like Ben’s unit. There isn’t any sibling bond in Alec’s unit, only a mechanical camaraderie.
This is your unit. You stay with your unit.
Alec remembers the first time he saw Ben. Alec remembers wandering into the shower, the shower that looked just like Alec’s shower, like all the showers at Manticore. He remembers how it looked like steel and smelled like steel and water and not at all like children.
They stood tiny and naked and silent under the falling water that cascaded down their shoulders, down their backs, to their bare little feet. They stood at attention, just like all the other units. Every unit looked the same in the shower. In the shower, you never saw anybody’s face. Ever.
But Ben had turned around and seen Alec and Alec had seen Ben and it had been a mirror. The standing guard had come back then, coffee in hand, realized that there were twins in the same room. He had dragged Alec out by the arm, thrown him back where he belonged. With his own unit.
You stay with your unit.
Alec throws up where he lays, vomit projecting a foot in front of him, only to come back, dribbling down the grass and into his hair. It pools around his head. The smell is terrible. Alec throws up again.
He shits again.
He cries again.
The turkey is gone. The turkey disappeared. Alec is glad because he doesn’t want to eat the turkey anymore. He just wants this to stop. He won’t ever eat another bird again, for as long as he lives. He swears. He just wants this to stop.
_______________________
Dean can't understand why Sam is still going on about that fucking kid.
“Why are you still going on about that fucking kid, Sam?” he asks, balling up the empty bag of Funyuns and tossing it into the backseat. He’s letting Sam drive. He hardly ever lets Sam drive, but he’s tired, and he had mistakenly come to the conclusion that allowing his baby brother the wheel would keep conversation about that fucking kid to a minimum.
“”He looked just like you, Dean. For the last time, he looked just like you. We can’t just ignore a kid who looks just like you.”
Dean rolls his eyes.
When Dean had regained consciousness, Sam had already been awake. Now Dean wishes that he had never opened his eyes. Seriously. It had been like that time, when he was fifteen and that girl had come over with a full belly demanding that Dean pay child support.
“For the last time, I didn’t knock up any girl in Montana. I don’t do freakishly strong chicks, either.”
Dean is willing to admit it. Having a nine-year-old kick his ass? Hurts the pride. Just a little.
“You do freakishly bendy chicks,” Sam reminds him.
“That is a completely different matter.”
The kid was some kind of a mutant, or demon. That much is obvious. No kid kicks Dean Winchester’s ass without some kind of help from the super-fucking-natural or radioactive goo.
“What if he-”
“No, Dean.”
“Sam, I’m gonna have to insist that you stop interrupting my theories.”
“I’m gonna have to insist that your theories stop involving radioactive goo.”
Dean snorts. Sam knows him too well - but Hell, that’s what you get for spending 4 years straight in a car with a guy. He doesn’t really want to talk about anything other than radioactive goo, so he doesn’t continue the conversation.
He tries to think about freakishly bendy chicks.
But his mind goes straight back to that fucking kid. That fucking kid with Dean’s face. That fucking kid with the smart mouth and the kick ass moves. We have to find him, Sam had said, a large hand cradling his aching head. We have to find Alec.
Alec. Half-naked Alec with a mouth covered in chicken blood.
He stares out the car window. There’s nobody on these Montana back roads. It’s just them, and the car, and the road. Sky and earth. It’s been two days since they have seen Alec. They had gotten rid of the spirit, stayed in that dump of house two nights, waited for Alec to come back. Alec never came back.
So they’re on the road again. And Dean is falling asleep.
He starts awake when his phone vibrates in his pants. He shuts the radio off before answering.
“Hello?”
“Is this Dean Winchester?”
“The one and only.”
Dean is glad that he can admit to being himself again. The Pulse took down the economy. It also took down his police record. Took his face and name out of the system.
“Mr. Winchester, this is Marsha Stark at St. Francis Medical Center in Butte, Montana. Somebody brought your son in.”
“My...son?”
“Yes. Well, we assume he’s your son. He’s not talking, but he had your wallet and he looks just like you...”
“Alec,” Dean breathes. “Is he...?”
“He’s going to be okay. He’s severely dehydrated, but he’s going to be okay. I assume you’ll be here soon?”
Dean agrees. They’ll be there soon.
___________________________
They keep asking him where the barcode came from. They have on blue scrubs and pink scrubs and horrifically patterned scrubs and they keep calling him pet names like “sweetie” and “baby” and “doll” and reassuring him that everything’s going to be okay. Then they ask him where the barcode came from.
Alec doesn’t speak. If he speaks, his voice will waver. Never show fear. He can’t ever show fear. He was not engineered to be afraid.
“Alec, honey, your daddy is in the waiting room.”
Daddy? No. No, no, no. They’d put out a missing persons report. They’d mentioned his barcode. Lydecker has found him. He is going to go back and be punished and they’ll do all sorts of things to him to make sure this never happens again. They might kill him. Or worse, put him in the basement with the anomalies.
“He’s very eager to see you. He looks very worried.”
Of course he does. They all know how to act at Manticore. The first thing Alec was ever taught was how to lie -- because Alec is a secret. Because Ben is a secret. They are all secrets.
Alec makes to rip the IV out of his arm. The nurse is a moron. She’s misjudging this move as childish enthusiasm - she thinks that Alec really just wants to see his daddy.
“Oh no, baby, don’t do that! He’ll be in in a second. You’re not well enough yet!”
But Alec has already ripped the IV from his arm and he’s up in a flash. He knocks the nurse over. Another one screams. He knocks her over, too, on his way out the door. These women are like pins and Alec is like a bowling ball. Alec knows all about bowling. Bowling is a sport for overweight men who can’t move very fast.
Alec is a wild animal, a lost deer in a sea of people. He scurries and dodges, instinct and fear leading him through the hallways and into the waiting room. It’s a shame the lack of fluid has left him without grace.
Someone manages to knock into him. He stumbles and his legs are like a fawn’s, spindly and unmanageable. He falls into a pair of arms that grip him tight, squeeze him, refuse to let him go.
“Alec, stop fighting, dude. It’s, uh...Uncle Sam. You remember me, right? Your Uncle Sam?”
Sam Winchester. The guy he’d left unconscious in the barn. Sam Winchester is 26 years old and a brother.
“Uncle Sam...?” Alec pants.
“Yeah, kiddo. It’s me. You remember me, right?” Sam’s long hair tickles the side of Alec’s face when the man leans in, whispers in his ear. “Just play along? We can get you out of here, okay?”
Alec doesn’t trust Sam Winchester. He doesn’t run, though, when the man’s arms loosen around him. He knows Sam doesn’t know anything. He still remembers the look of astonishment that had graced the man’s face in the barn, the way Sam had looked between Dean and Alec like he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Uncle Sam?” Alec asks again.
“Yeah, buddy. It’s me.”
Sam’s voice is gentle and understanding. Alec turns around to face him, takes in the warm blue-grey eyes and the soft face, blinks.
“We were worried.” Sam sounds sincere. Alec feels a big hand on his back, feels it push him in, and the next thing he knows he’s pressed against this man’s chest. Alec doesn’t know what to do. Instinct takes over as his arms wrap around Sam’s neck and suddenly he’s really high up, far off the ground, still planted firmly in Sam’s arms.
“Tall enough, are you?” Alec asks. He speaks into Sam's neck. His whole body vibrates as the man chuckles. Alec feels like sleeping, even though he never feels like sleeping. Alec doesn’t sleep.
“Sam? Alec...”
Dean. Alec hears the frantic note in Dean’s voice as he explains the wreckage he just came across, fallen nurses who weren’t even all that hot.
People are watching them. Sam asks him if he wants to go to his dad.
The exchange is natural. Sam and Dean know how to act, too, and Dean’s eyes are filled with warmth and worry as he holds out his arms to intercept Alec.
“You okay, little dude?”
“I’m fine, Daddy.”
People melt around them. They’re dirty and homeless and they still melt around them. Doctors and nurses and even nurses that Alec just pushed over melt around them.
Alec stays quiet as the three of them are led into a room. Sam and Dean come up with some kind of tale about how Alec had been left with his mother. They’d left him the wallets as tokens - so Alec would always have a piece of them around.
“Alec...why were you so far from home?”
Alec is quick on his feet. Or his ass, rather, which is planted in Dean’s lap. “Mom left me...” His eyes well up with tears. “I just w-wanted to find Daddy and Uncle Sam...we didn’t have a phone and I didn’t have any...any change...”
Alec is very good at making himself cry. These people are eating it up and they’re quick to tell him that he’ll be going home with his daddy and Uncle Sam very soon. They’re so set on making him feel better that they forget to ask about the barcode.
They release him on the conditions that he drinks plenty of fluids and stays in bed. Sam makes him apologize to the fallen nurses on the way out. He does, though stiffly, and Sam adds in an extra apology and has to elbow Dean in order to get him to do the same.
It all seems so natural and Alec is still running a fever. He almost forgets that it isn’t real.
Dean carries him to the car, puts him in the back seat with a blanket and a pillow. It isn’t until they start the car that the questions start.
“So, Alec...what the hell are you?”
Alec decides then and there that he kind of misses the nurses and their hideous shirts and their pet names.
Next
Author: scourgeofeurope
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rating: Ah, fuck. I just said fuck. I say fuck a lot. Is that considered an R or a PG-13 these days? One of those.
Summary: Sam and Dean find a tiny smartass in a barn in Montana. What are they to do?
Author's Notes: I wrote stuff. I demand patronizing pats on the back. <3
Previous chapters and more info can be found here.
____________________________
Chapter Two: Non-Alcoholic Wild Turkey
_______________________________
Alec is staring in the face of a wild turkey. It’s not like the chicken, though. With the chicken he was half-mad with starvation and only too happy to break the hen’s neck, tear the feathers out of the still-quivering body. This turkey is big and honestly, just a little bit scary. And Alec doesn’t feel like eating it.
He feels sick to his stomach. He’s never really felt sick to his stomach before. He’s felt his bones broken, his arms and legs clinically crushed and snapped. He’s felt a drill go into his skull, needles injected into every portion of his young skin.
But he’s never felt sick to his stomach.
It’s really kind of a weird sensation, he thinks. He feels it coming, and before he knows it, there’s a putrid mess flying out of his mouth and hitting the grass. He clutches his stomach and sobs. Tears run down his face. He remembers the last time he cried.
The last time he cried, one of the guards hit him in the face and told him to stop crying.
Alec stops crying. Soldiers don’t cry.
He smells it before he feels it. And he starts crying again.
The turkey watches him with doleful eyes as he strips off his already torn pants. He wants to tell it to stop looking at him. He wants to tell it that this has never happened before. He wants to tell it.
Alec doesn’t eliminate in his pants. Soldiers don’t shit themselves.
There’s blood in his stool and he bites his lip hard to stop himself from sobbing further. He tries to wipe them clean against the ground, but grass just sticks to the waste.
He wonders where the others are. He wonders if Ben made it over the fence.
Alec takes a moment to curse his own survival while another wave of nausea overtakes him. He pukes and shits. He stumbles, sobbing over to relatively cleaner grass and falls down, curls up.
He is naked and tiny and the weather is getting colder. The turkey doesn’t bother him. He’s glad he didn’t eat it. It’s food, but it doesn’t deserve to die. Not right now. Not when Alec isn’t hungry - not when Alec’s head is resting in a pool of his own vomit.
He shivers. He can’t stop shivering. He wonders where the others are. He wonders if Ben, if anybody, made it over the fence.
Salmonella.
Alec reaches over and fishes through his pants for the two wallets he lifted yesterday. Those two guys...Dean, the one who looked exactly like him. And Sam. Sam was the one who kept staring, blinking, unable to believe what was right in front of his eyes.
They had no idea, Alec realizes now. He opens a wallet, pulls out a driver’s license.
Sam Winchester is twenty-six years old.
He opens the other wallet.
Dean Winchester is thirty years old.
Brothers. Alec knows about brothers like he knows about sisters. He’d seen a sister take a bullet. He’d seen brothers run and run, evading the barrage of shots, hands on each other’s backs, pulling one another behind trees. It was like a free for all in the end there, but it wasn’t exactly like a free for all.
It was definitely a free for all for Alec. Alec isn’t a brother, has never been a brother. His unit isn’t like Ben’s unit. There isn’t any sibling bond in Alec’s unit, only a mechanical camaraderie.
This is your unit. You stay with your unit.
Alec remembers the first time he saw Ben. Alec remembers wandering into the shower, the shower that looked just like Alec’s shower, like all the showers at Manticore. He remembers how it looked like steel and smelled like steel and water and not at all like children.
They stood tiny and naked and silent under the falling water that cascaded down their shoulders, down their backs, to their bare little feet. They stood at attention, just like all the other units. Every unit looked the same in the shower. In the shower, you never saw anybody’s face. Ever.
But Ben had turned around and seen Alec and Alec had seen Ben and it had been a mirror. The standing guard had come back then, coffee in hand, realized that there were twins in the same room. He had dragged Alec out by the arm, thrown him back where he belonged. With his own unit.
You stay with your unit.
Alec throws up where he lays, vomit projecting a foot in front of him, only to come back, dribbling down the grass and into his hair. It pools around his head. The smell is terrible. Alec throws up again.
He shits again.
He cries again.
The turkey is gone. The turkey disappeared. Alec is glad because he doesn’t want to eat the turkey anymore. He just wants this to stop. He won’t ever eat another bird again, for as long as he lives. He swears. He just wants this to stop.
_______________________
Dean can't understand why Sam is still going on about that fucking kid.
“Why are you still going on about that fucking kid, Sam?” he asks, balling up the empty bag of Funyuns and tossing it into the backseat. He’s letting Sam drive. He hardly ever lets Sam drive, but he’s tired, and he had mistakenly come to the conclusion that allowing his baby brother the wheel would keep conversation about that fucking kid to a minimum.
“”He looked just like you, Dean. For the last time, he looked just like you. We can’t just ignore a kid who looks just like you.”
Dean rolls his eyes.
When Dean had regained consciousness, Sam had already been awake. Now Dean wishes that he had never opened his eyes. Seriously. It had been like that time, when he was fifteen and that girl had come over with a full belly demanding that Dean pay child support.
“For the last time, I didn’t knock up any girl in Montana. I don’t do freakishly strong chicks, either.”
Dean is willing to admit it. Having a nine-year-old kick his ass? Hurts the pride. Just a little.
“You do freakishly bendy chicks,” Sam reminds him.
“That is a completely different matter.”
The kid was some kind of a mutant, or demon. That much is obvious. No kid kicks Dean Winchester’s ass without some kind of help from the super-fucking-natural or radioactive goo.
“What if he-”
“No, Dean.”
“Sam, I’m gonna have to insist that you stop interrupting my theories.”
“I’m gonna have to insist that your theories stop involving radioactive goo.”
Dean snorts. Sam knows him too well - but Hell, that’s what you get for spending 4 years straight in a car with a guy. He doesn’t really want to talk about anything other than radioactive goo, so he doesn’t continue the conversation.
He tries to think about freakishly bendy chicks.
But his mind goes straight back to that fucking kid. That fucking kid with Dean’s face. That fucking kid with the smart mouth and the kick ass moves. We have to find him, Sam had said, a large hand cradling his aching head. We have to find Alec.
Alec. Half-naked Alec with a mouth covered in chicken blood.
He stares out the car window. There’s nobody on these Montana back roads. It’s just them, and the car, and the road. Sky and earth. It’s been two days since they have seen Alec. They had gotten rid of the spirit, stayed in that dump of house two nights, waited for Alec to come back. Alec never came back.
So they’re on the road again. And Dean is falling asleep.
He starts awake when his phone vibrates in his pants. He shuts the radio off before answering.
“Hello?”
“Is this Dean Winchester?”
“The one and only.”
Dean is glad that he can admit to being himself again. The Pulse took down the economy. It also took down his police record. Took his face and name out of the system.
“Mr. Winchester, this is Marsha Stark at St. Francis Medical Center in Butte, Montana. Somebody brought your son in.”
“My...son?”
“Yes. Well, we assume he’s your son. He’s not talking, but he had your wallet and he looks just like you...”
“Alec,” Dean breathes. “Is he...?”
“He’s going to be okay. He’s severely dehydrated, but he’s going to be okay. I assume you’ll be here soon?”
Dean agrees. They’ll be there soon.
___________________________
They keep asking him where the barcode came from. They have on blue scrubs and pink scrubs and horrifically patterned scrubs and they keep calling him pet names like “sweetie” and “baby” and “doll” and reassuring him that everything’s going to be okay. Then they ask him where the barcode came from.
Alec doesn’t speak. If he speaks, his voice will waver. Never show fear. He can’t ever show fear. He was not engineered to be afraid.
“Alec, honey, your daddy is in the waiting room.”
Daddy? No. No, no, no. They’d put out a missing persons report. They’d mentioned his barcode. Lydecker has found him. He is going to go back and be punished and they’ll do all sorts of things to him to make sure this never happens again. They might kill him. Or worse, put him in the basement with the anomalies.
“He’s very eager to see you. He looks very worried.”
Of course he does. They all know how to act at Manticore. The first thing Alec was ever taught was how to lie -- because Alec is a secret. Because Ben is a secret. They are all secrets.
Alec makes to rip the IV out of his arm. The nurse is a moron. She’s misjudging this move as childish enthusiasm - she thinks that Alec really just wants to see his daddy.
“Oh no, baby, don’t do that! He’ll be in in a second. You’re not well enough yet!”
But Alec has already ripped the IV from his arm and he’s up in a flash. He knocks the nurse over. Another one screams. He knocks her over, too, on his way out the door. These women are like pins and Alec is like a bowling ball. Alec knows all about bowling. Bowling is a sport for overweight men who can’t move very fast.
Alec is a wild animal, a lost deer in a sea of people. He scurries and dodges, instinct and fear leading him through the hallways and into the waiting room. It’s a shame the lack of fluid has left him without grace.
Someone manages to knock into him. He stumbles and his legs are like a fawn’s, spindly and unmanageable. He falls into a pair of arms that grip him tight, squeeze him, refuse to let him go.
“Alec, stop fighting, dude. It’s, uh...Uncle Sam. You remember me, right? Your Uncle Sam?”
Sam Winchester. The guy he’d left unconscious in the barn. Sam Winchester is 26 years old and a brother.
“Uncle Sam...?” Alec pants.
“Yeah, kiddo. It’s me. You remember me, right?” Sam’s long hair tickles the side of Alec’s face when the man leans in, whispers in his ear. “Just play along? We can get you out of here, okay?”
Alec doesn’t trust Sam Winchester. He doesn’t run, though, when the man’s arms loosen around him. He knows Sam doesn’t know anything. He still remembers the look of astonishment that had graced the man’s face in the barn, the way Sam had looked between Dean and Alec like he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Uncle Sam?” Alec asks again.
“Yeah, buddy. It’s me.”
Sam’s voice is gentle and understanding. Alec turns around to face him, takes in the warm blue-grey eyes and the soft face, blinks.
“We were worried.” Sam sounds sincere. Alec feels a big hand on his back, feels it push him in, and the next thing he knows he’s pressed against this man’s chest. Alec doesn’t know what to do. Instinct takes over as his arms wrap around Sam’s neck and suddenly he’s really high up, far off the ground, still planted firmly in Sam’s arms.
“Tall enough, are you?” Alec asks. He speaks into Sam's neck. His whole body vibrates as the man chuckles. Alec feels like sleeping, even though he never feels like sleeping. Alec doesn’t sleep.
“Sam? Alec...”
Dean. Alec hears the frantic note in Dean’s voice as he explains the wreckage he just came across, fallen nurses who weren’t even all that hot.
People are watching them. Sam asks him if he wants to go to his dad.
The exchange is natural. Sam and Dean know how to act, too, and Dean’s eyes are filled with warmth and worry as he holds out his arms to intercept Alec.
“You okay, little dude?”
“I’m fine, Daddy.”
People melt around them. They’re dirty and homeless and they still melt around them. Doctors and nurses and even nurses that Alec just pushed over melt around them.
Alec stays quiet as the three of them are led into a room. Sam and Dean come up with some kind of tale about how Alec had been left with his mother. They’d left him the wallets as tokens - so Alec would always have a piece of them around.
“Alec...why were you so far from home?”
Alec is quick on his feet. Or his ass, rather, which is planted in Dean’s lap. “Mom left me...” His eyes well up with tears. “I just w-wanted to find Daddy and Uncle Sam...we didn’t have a phone and I didn’t have any...any change...”
Alec is very good at making himself cry. These people are eating it up and they’re quick to tell him that he’ll be going home with his daddy and Uncle Sam very soon. They’re so set on making him feel better that they forget to ask about the barcode.
They release him on the conditions that he drinks plenty of fluids and stays in bed. Sam makes him apologize to the fallen nurses on the way out. He does, though stiffly, and Sam adds in an extra apology and has to elbow Dean in order to get him to do the same.
It all seems so natural and Alec is still running a fever. He almost forgets that it isn’t real.
Dean carries him to the car, puts him in the back seat with a blanket and a pillow. It isn’t until they start the car that the questions start.
“So, Alec...what the hell are you?”
Alec decides then and there that he kind of misses the nurses and their hideous shirts and their pet names.
Next