"Hunters"-Dean Winchester and Victor Henriksen
TITLE: Hunters
AUTHOR: Mari
FANDOM: Supernatural
PAIRING: Dean Winchester/Victor Henriksen
SPOILERS: Through 3.12-”Jus Ad Bello”
Dean Winchester and Victor Henriksen are at first glance one of the more unlikely pairings to come out of Supernatural; that tends to happen when one half of the ship has a nearly pathological need to defy authority, and the other is sworn to uphold it. (Also, there’s the minor wrinkle where Victor spent more than a year thinking that Dean was a particularly vicious serial killer.) Once the differences in their circumstances are overlooked, however, it becomes clear that Dean and Victor are much more similar than the two of them would like to admit: good men who have dedicated their lives to protecting innocent people and stopping monsters, and who have the potential to get along famously with each other once they realize this.
The Men:
Dean Winchester is first introduced to us in the pilot episode of the series. We see him as a four year-old child while his infant brother, Sam, is being put to bed for the night by parents Mary and John. We then see him again after the house has been set on fire by a demon who has also murdered his mother by dragging her onto the ceiling above Sam’s crib and eviscerating her. John grabs Sam from his crib, all but hurls him into Dean’s arms, and screams at Dean to get his brother outside. Dean does, his father follows, and the Winchesters are changed forever. John goes on a quest afterwards to find out what killed Mary and why, and to stop something like this from happening to as many other families as he possibly can, taking the boys with him. Dean and Sam both learn that they have no chance at a normal childhood as John trains them to cope with the darker and more savage world that lurks beneath the one that they used to know and as he disappears for long stretches of time on hunting trips deemed too dangerous for the children. Even though both boys are irrevocably altered by this childhood, however, it is undeniably Dean who bears the brunt of the pressure. He’s older, older than Sam, thus immediately being cast into the role of protector and maternal figure to his younger brother while his father continues the paternal role, and also old enough to remember that their lives weren’t always like this. John, perhaps knowing right from the beginning that there is something off about Sam in order to make the demon target their house in the first place, places an intense pressure upon Dean to keep Sam safe, both physically and spiritually. To a young Dean, it seems that his father’s entire opinion of him is tied up in how well Dean is a “good son”: how well he follows orders and how well he looks after Sam, to the detriment of anything that Dean himself might want from his life. While this is not the case, as John loves his son and acknowledges in the season two premiere that he has put burdens on Dean that were far too heavy for a child his age to bear, he only expresses this once before he dies in that same episode. (And he does it while putting yet another chore to Dean that no parent should ever ask of their child, which is why, in spite of some fantastic acting on the part of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, I can’t help but have a very low opinion of Daddy Winchester.) It’s still printed into Dean’s brain so deeply that it’s unlikely he’ll ever shake it off entirely that his purpose and worth in life is irrevocably tied up in how Sam is doing at the moment to an extent that Sam, who was so little that he doesn’t remember any other life than hunting and who was sheltered from a great deal by Dean’s role as protector, is never going to be able to match. He wants, more than anything else, to have a family. He wants to be loved.
A desire for family and love is a very normal, human thing that everyone experiences, but when put into that context it seems terribly depressing. I certainly would not find it appealing if someone was describing Dean Winchester to me in those terms; I would recommend that the gentleman in question find his way into some therapy and come talk to me again after he had gotten his head straightened out a bit. There’s no denying that Dean is not psychologically healthy. However, this is only a small part of what there is to Dean, and it’s a part of him that has only begun to receive steady attention from the writers over the past season and a half or so. The entire first season of the show is focused on Dean’s role as a Big Damned Hero, which he most assuredly is. The Dean that we see in those twenty or so episodes loves his brother and will do virtually anything in order to protect him, but he also loves his job as a hunter and the role that he takes in protecting other innocent people from the same things that he went through as a result of the demon’s attack. He nearly worships John and grows angry whenever Sam speaks badly of him, but he also loves his job just because he loves his job. Dean has a very black and white view of the world: there’s humans, and then there are Supernatural Things. Sometimes humans can be bad and have to be taken out (it’s interesting that, for all that Sam has rapidly become the more ruthless of the pair, it was Dean who first admitted the possibility that sometimes humans who dabbled in dark forces might just have to be killed), but Supernatural Things are always evil, and must always be killed. This worldview begins to be proven wrong to him almost immediately, as it turns out that Sam might be one of those supernatural beings himself in the show’s major mytharc. Dean has since grown to have a much more troubled relationship with all beings supernatural since his brother is both telekinetic and sometimes prone to visions, but he still has a very hardline view on good and evil: if it’s evil, we kill it, and if it’s good (or even not so good), we save it. He doesn’t even pause for the usual weighing of consequences before he leaps in front of a gun to save someone in 1.14-"Nightmares".
Now that we know that Dean is both deeply troubled and deeply heroic, there are the facets of his personality that just make him fun. He drinks fairly heavily when he’s “off the clock”, though not to the extent that John did and with an eye towards social fun rather than bitter brooding. He likes classic rock, classic cars, and sex. Dean really likes sex, and his promiscuity is one of the show’s big running jokes. It’s interesting to note that, in the first two seasons at least (and something that I dearly wish that the show would go back to), it was also clear that Dean just liked women, period. They were a strange and nearly exotic species to him, having grown up around so few of them and with the Legend of Mary, the whole reason for their family’s quest for vengeance, coming down from John, that Dean was fascinated by women qua women, and frequently didn’t know what he was supposed to make of them at all.
Except for having sex. Because, no, really, it cannot be denied: Dean Winchester is a slut.
He also has a snarky, wisecracking sense of humor that makes liberal use of pop culture references and a knee-jerk antagonistic response to any and all authority. Dean holds a fairly dim view of cops in general: they couldn’t save his mother and they can’t save people from the things that he fights, so in general they’re just a nuisance that gets in his way. (This is particularly ironic when one considers that Dean wanted to be a firefighter when he was growing up, also a job that’s appealing to those who want to save people and uphold order: for all that Dean plays at being an anarchist sometimes, he’s really not.) Thanks to a little incident with a shapeshifter in Baltimore early in the series and the stubborn refusal of both Winchesters to wear some freaking gloves when they’re traipsing around the scenes of all these grisly supernatural murders, the cops have a pretty dim view of Dean Winchester, too.
And that brings us to the other half of the pairing, one Victor Henriksen. Victor has only appeared in three episodes of the series thus far (yes, I am going to stubbornly say “thus far”, and you can’t stop me), so we don’t have nearly the amount of canon information to go on when it comes to him. He was first introduced in episode 2.12, “Nightshifter”, in which the boys have had to return to Baltimore in order to deal with another shapeshifter, this one who is using its abilities in order to steal from banks and jewelry stores. This shapeshifter kills the person it’s imitating and then uses that person’s form so that it can infiltrate their place of employment. Victor is an FBI agent who has been tracking Dean ever since the earlier incident in Baltimore, never mind that Dean and Sam killed the original shapeshifter while it was still wearing Dean’s face, so that to the eyes of the law he ought to have been dead. We clearly learn that Victor is smarter than that. In addition to being an FBI agent, and thus one of the most elite members of the law that Dean so loves to poke at, he’s simply a good man. He believes in law and order and, most of all, in saving people, to the point that later in the series he expresses a frustration to Dean that being tied up in an inter-office paperwork and bitching has stopped him from actually doing his job. He’s incredibly intelligent, incorruptible, and has no sympathy for people who have done the kinds of things that he believes Dean has done. They’re monsters; he stops them. That they have a greater claim as members of the human species than the monsters that Dean hunts is only a small detail. Remember, from early on in the series Dean has been willing to acknowledge that humans are capable of just as much ugliness as the actual supernatural creepies and crawlies.
And it has to be said: while we have no way of knowing how much Victor sleeps around or how much he drinks, he’s a smartass to a level that rivals Dean’s own fast mouth. He barely got through his very first scene in his very first episode before I was mouthing, “Oh, I love this man!”
The History:
“Nightshifter” is the first time that Dean and Victor make contact with each other, though they won’t actually meet face to face for a few more months. After journeying to Milwaukee in order to deal with the second shapeshifter, the job goes bad on Dean and Sam with a swiftness, leaving them trapped with a bank full of hostages that they did not actually want, dozens of angry cops outside, and a shapeshifter inside who’s hesitating to make its presence known. The last thing that they need is for an FBI agent who’s been stalking them for months without their notice to come swaggering in and taking over the situation (neatly alienating the local police as he does so), but that’s exactly what Victor does. Dean takes a phone call with the police in which they’re supposed to be negotiating terms: Victor takes charge of that, too, and he and Dean wind up having this conversation:
DEAN: Yeah.
VICTOR: This is Special Agent Victor Henriksen.
DEAN: Yeah, listen, I’m not really in a negotiating mood right now-
VICTOR: Good, me neither. It’s my job to bring you in: alive’s a bonus, but not neccessary.
DEAN: Whoa, that’s kind of harsh for a federal agent, don’t you think?
VICTOR: Well, you’re not the typical suspect, are you, Dean? (As the camera breaks away to focus on Dean’s stunned face.) I want you and Sam out here, now, or we come in. And, yes, I know about Sam, too, Bonnie to your Clyde.
DEAN: Hey, well, that part’s true, but how’d you even know we were here?
VICTOR: Go screw yourself, that’s how I knew. It’s become my job to know about you Dean. I’ve been looking for you for weeks. I know about the murder in St. Louis, I know about the Houdini act you pulled in Baltimore, I know about the desecrations and the thefts. I know about your dad.
DEAN (visibly shaken): You don’t know crap about my dad.
VICTOR: Ex-Marine, raised his kids on the road, cheap motels, backwoods cabins? Real paramilitary survivalist type. I just can’t get a handle on what kind of whacko he was. White supremacist, Timmy McVeigh, tomato, tom-ah-to.
Dean (and it’s worth noting at this point that Dean has started to do the faux-friendly hostile smile that he gets right before he kicks someone’s ass): You got no right talking about my dad like that. He was a hero.
VICTOR: Yeah, right. Sure sounds like it. You have one hour to come out those doors or we come in, full automatic. (He hangs up. Dean pauses to lower his head for a second, all “Oh, fuck.”)
It turns out that Victor’s lying about the hour, too; he wants men in there within five minutes. While this seems as if he’s playing hardball with too much willingness at first glance, he does it because he knows that Dean and Sam are dangerous, even if he does not know which side they’re actually on. He does it because he took one glance at the situation and realized that Dean and Sam are not the bank-robbing type, so they’re not doing this for the money and therefore there must be something else within the bank that they want. As there was no way at this point for Victor to know that what they wanted was to hunt down a shapeshifter similar to the one responsible for bringing the FBI down on Dean in the first place, his next best guess is that they’re there so that Dean can give vent to what looks like an insatiable need to kill. Out of everyone there, he is the only one who seems to really understand how dangerous the Winchesters, and Dean in particular, actually are.
And let’s talk about the conversation itself, shall we? It mostly tells us about Victor, as we’ve had a full season and a half thus far, to learn about Dean, but oh, man, the things that it contains in less than a page of dialogue. We learn that Victor is smart. We learn that he’s incredibly good at his job. We learn that he’s an incredible smartass who has absolutely no respect for things that cross that line and start to kill; he believes that he’s hunting monsters every bit as much as Dean does. In short, he is Dean in a lot of key ways, and it’s clear by how visibly shaken Dean is at the end of their conversation that Dean knows it, too. He was able to dissect Dean’s entire, messed-up life within the span of thirty seconds; it was brilliant.
I won’t lie to you. I fell in love with Victor in that moment, and I haven’t stopped since.
The Winchesters get away, of course, or there would no longer be a series (but reams of opportunity for cameos on Prison Break). “We’re screwed,” seems to be Dean’s opinion on the matter as the boys sit in their stolen SWAT gear outside. He knows a good hunter when he meets one, being a good hunter himself, and he knows that Victor is going to be a force to be reckoned with from that point forward.
As fantastic as the phone call was, it’s nothing compared to the moment when Dean and Victor finally meet face to face, months later in “Folsom Prison Blues.” Dean and Sam set out to get themselves caught by the FBI so that they will be thrown into a certain Arizona prison until extradition, where they plan on exorcising a ghost that’s been terrorizing it and then escaping themselves. (Small note: you really have to pause and admire a set of hunters so good that they deliberately get themselves thrown into prison with every intention of breaking right out again.) Victor arrives to interrogate both Winchesters, and his conversation with Dean goes something like this:
VICTOR: You think you’re funny?
DEAN: I think I’m adorable.
VICTOR: It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Dean. I’m Special Agent Victor Henriksen, and this is my partner, Special Agent Reidy.
DEAN: Henriksen? Not the Milwaukee Henriksen.
VICTOR: Live and in person. (Displaying a picture of Dean from the bank.) Aww, nice shot. You can hang that up in your cell at Super Max.
DEAN: All right, maybe we can just forget the cheeseburgers, yeah.
VICTOR: Yeah, keep that game face on. Try to cover up how cornered you are. Read him the charges.
REID: Well, we got mail fraud, credit card fraud, grave desecration--
VICTOR: Skip to the good ones.
REIDY: Well, we’ve got armed robbery, kidnapping and, oh, yeah: three counts of first degree murder.
VICTOR: And after Milwaukee, your brother is a suspect in a murder case himself. I’d say that for you two, “Screwed to hell” is a major understatement.
DEAN: Well, where there’s life there’s hope, huh?
VICTOR: See, that’s what I kept thinking as I was searching for your asses all over hell and gone. (Getting up in Dean’s face, and Dean gets just the faintest trace of that “about to pop the hell out of you” smirk of his.) Your dad taught you well. The way that you covered your tracks, and the after Milwaukee, the way that you just--*whistles*--vanished. Near went nuts trying to find out. Ask him.
REIDY: He near went nuts.
VICTOR: And after all of that, you get tripped up on a motion detector. Pretty rookie move. Gotta say, I was--surprised.
Dean’s public defender interrupts before Victor can go further, but one gets the sense from the way that the conversation ended that Victor’s brain was already moving ahead, wondering what lay behind the rookie mistake. He doesn’t cooperate with the PD later in the episode, to my mind, less because she’s suggesting that there are things about the Winchester case that doesn’t make sense and more because she’s raising her objections based upon Dean’s making doe eyes at her. Victor is a man of reason and science, and he doesn’t truck well at all with that brand of nonsense. (If I wasn’t already in love with the man, the moment in which he dryly tells her that “grown-ups are trying to work here” would have surely won me over.) The most important thing to note in this scene is the absolute respect that Dean and Victor pay each other. Most of the dialogue is Victor’s, as Dean sits back in his supposed disadvantage and reviews the antagonist that he’s only getting to meet face to face for the first time, but he recognizes Victor’s name immediately. Outside of a single amused glance Reid’s way at “He near went nuts,” he doesn’t take his eyes off of Victor once. And Victor, for his part, does the same, acknowledging in Dean a great mind at work in order to stay ahead for that long. A great mind in the service of evil, which is why I don’t think that any Victor/Dean is plausible until Victor is shown how the world really functions, but he does not for one single, solitary second in the course of the series take Dean for a fool. After Milwaukee, neither does Dean do the same for Victor: they are two men who meet each other absolutely acknowledging that the other is his equal in competence and overall badassery.
The Winchesters get away again, of course. This time, rather than impersonating members of a SWAT team, they use the help of their public defender to mislead Victor and his men to an entirely different cemetery than the one where they actually need to perform the necessary exorcism. One can only imagine how much stewing Victor does over the near-year it takes for us to meet him again.
When Victor finally catches up with Dean and Sam again, he does so because Dean’s nemesis, Bela, has tipped him off as to their location in order to throw Dean off of her trail for a little while longer. The Winchesters are arrested and thrown into a local jail to await their transfer to a high-security federal prison for trial; Victor has learned his lesson from the last time. The only problem with his plan is that the army of demons that has been pursuing Sam all season has finally decided to strike at him en masse-and they’ll possess anyone that they have to in order to do it. Dean and Sam do their best to alert Victor to this fact, only to fall on deaf ears, even when Victor’s possessed boss tries to shoot both of them within their cell and is exorcised in return (releasing the demon into the air to mingle with those outside rather than sending him back to hell). It’s not something that a man of fingerprints and DNA evidence believes in without hard proof; it is important to keep in mind that these are the tricks of Victor’s trade every bit as much as rock salt and silver bullets are the tricks of Dean’s. Luckily for Dean and Sam, Victor finds his way over to their side soon enough, as he’s the very next of them to be possessed by a demon. Dean and Sam are expecting this turn of events, however, and have used a rosary stolen from the station’s Catholic secretary to turn their toilet into holy water. They exorcise the demon from Victor, but not before he kills the sheriff.
Victor is a man of reason, and after being given such indisputable proof as to the things that were bumping around the night without his notice, he’s quick to join the boys’ side. As he aids in preparing for the inevitable onslaught against the station, he and Dean talk again. This time, their conversation is amicable, with Dean saying that, while he doesn’t think that he and Sam can stop the apocalypse forever, there’s a nobility in fighting it all the same. This is a sentiment that resonates with Victor very strongly, which makes sense when you consider who many violent crimes actually go unsolved. Having been shown becoming frustrated with the paperwork and nonsense that kept him from being able to do his job and protect people earlier in the episode, he now says that he would not mind joining Sam and Dean in fighting this new kind of evil that he’s discovered.
The body language is markedly different between them in every aspect but one: the respect that was between them even while Victor thought that Dean was a wholehearted monster is still there, but the men themselves are now starting to realize that they are two sides of the same coin. There’s a sense in the air that Victor will be stumbling his way towards becoming a hunter himself as soon as the mess in the station is put to bed, and that he and Dean will even be friends after this battle is put to rest.
The demons attack, but are repelled due to some quick thinking on the part of Sam: he tapes an exorcism ritual and then Victor plays it over the station’s PA system, so that every demon within hearing range is driven out of the body that it’s inhabiting at once. Victor thinks that maybe Dean and Sam were “killed” in a fire that destroyed the helicopter which had come to collect them earlier; he thinks that their bodies were burned so badly that it’s impossible to even identify the corpses through dental records. After over a year of running, Dean in particular is quick to accept this gift.
Unluckily for fans of both Victor as a character and Dean/Victor as a ‘ship, however, his final episode ends on a sour note. While Victor, the remaining deputies, and the secretary are cleaning up the station, a very young girl enters the station. She’s Lilith, a rival to Sam’s eventual leadership of the demonic horde, and she’s not pleased to find that her prey has escaped her. We see Victor wheeling towards her as he recognizes her name, and then the screen goes white. We then cut to Dean and Sam watching a news bulletin in which it appears that everyone within the station was killed.
Why They Work, and a Possible History for the Ship:
Dean and Victor are both fundamentally good men, which is a big part of why they work and something important to keep in mind while writing them. Though Dean has become rather overwhelmed with his personal life over the past season and a half, he entered hunting as a profession in the first place because he enjoys helping people and stopping the bad guys. Guess what? That was why Victor entered law enforcement, as well, and a big part of his frustration with his job is the perception that he spends more time dotting i’s and crossing t’s than he does finding monsters. They have chosen different methods of enacting their goals, but the end is fundamentally the same: save people, and stop the things that would harm them. Everything that kept them from becoming allies with one another was a strictly external factor; based upon internal ones, they ought to have gotten along famously, as they did at the end of Victor’s final episode. Dean and Victor are interesting because they look they ought to be an adversarial, hate sex kind of ship and yet they’re not; they’re really the kind of men more likely to be beer buddies with each other. More importantly, it is because they’re both good men that they can’t be an adversarial ship: Victor would have nothing to do with Dean, thinking that he was a serial killer, and Dean’s baiting of Victor occurs precisely because he knows that Victor is a decent man doing a good job. (This season in particular has shown how Dean reacts when he’s confronting people for whom he has an inherent disrespect, and he’s much more vicious.) They’re good men, doing good work. They both want to help people, and they both get frustrated when entangling red tape prevents them from doing so. And they are both-and this is my very favorite thing about them-utter smart alecks. Any fic featuring the two of them in a romantic or sexual context would have to feature a lot of sassing each other, and a lot of endearments delivered under the guise of insults. That’s why they’re fun.
The future of the ship is up in the air right now for one very obvious reason: Victor is presumed dead. It’s ironic that the one episode that got people to seeing the clear level of subtext between the two of them (previously it had been only myself and a handful of other crazy souls) was the one in which Kripke apparently decided to kill him off. I say “presumed” and “apparently” because the shot itself was very arty and vague: there was some slo-mo, a white light, and then we cut to the news broadcast. Without ever seeing a body, and at the end of an episode in which Victor deliberately mentioned fire as a means of faking a death, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Kripke still has something up his sleeve. If it is just wishful thinking, however, then the very vagueness of the way that Victor died leaves room for the fannish writer to resurrect him and set him on the path to becoming the hunter that he was considering becoming at the time of his death.
Resources and Fics:
There has been very little Dean/Victor fic written, for reasons that I alluded to above: Victor died at the end of the first ep in which there was blatant Dean/Victor subtext, rather than little tastes. However, there have been a few gems, and reams of good Victor gen pieces to whet the appetites of those who would like to take it further. Firstly, the only explicitly Dean/Victor fic that I’ve been able to find:
Cops and Robbers by minim_calibre is an amazing Dean/Victor fic that’s heavy on plot, snark, and the amazing parallels that do exist between them.
Barring that, there have been several fics that feature Dean and Victor interacting with each other or just wandering around being awesome separately:
A Just Cause takes place immediately after “Jus Ad Bello”, is written by smilla02, and is now my personal canon. The end.
Gift. Victor turns out to have powers. Lovely.
Always Some Door Open by dotfic. You know what really makes a fandom awesome? Body-swap.
Cops and Robbers. If I’m allowed to pimp my own work here, that is. Victor figures it out.
AUTHOR: Mari
FANDOM: Supernatural
PAIRING: Dean Winchester/Victor Henriksen
SPOILERS: Through 3.12-”Jus Ad Bello”
Dean Winchester and Victor Henriksen are at first glance one of the more unlikely pairings to come out of Supernatural; that tends to happen when one half of the ship has a nearly pathological need to defy authority, and the other is sworn to uphold it. (Also, there’s the minor wrinkle where Victor spent more than a year thinking that Dean was a particularly vicious serial killer.) Once the differences in their circumstances are overlooked, however, it becomes clear that Dean and Victor are much more similar than the two of them would like to admit: good men who have dedicated their lives to protecting innocent people and stopping monsters, and who have the potential to get along famously with each other once they realize this.
The Men:
Dean Winchester is first introduced to us in the pilot episode of the series. We see him as a four year-old child while his infant brother, Sam, is being put to bed for the night by parents Mary and John. We then see him again after the house has been set on fire by a demon who has also murdered his mother by dragging her onto the ceiling above Sam’s crib and eviscerating her. John grabs Sam from his crib, all but hurls him into Dean’s arms, and screams at Dean to get his brother outside. Dean does, his father follows, and the Winchesters are changed forever. John goes on a quest afterwards to find out what killed Mary and why, and to stop something like this from happening to as many other families as he possibly can, taking the boys with him. Dean and Sam both learn that they have no chance at a normal childhood as John trains them to cope with the darker and more savage world that lurks beneath the one that they used to know and as he disappears for long stretches of time on hunting trips deemed too dangerous for the children. Even though both boys are irrevocably altered by this childhood, however, it is undeniably Dean who bears the brunt of the pressure. He’s older, older than Sam, thus immediately being cast into the role of protector and maternal figure to his younger brother while his father continues the paternal role, and also old enough to remember that their lives weren’t always like this. John, perhaps knowing right from the beginning that there is something off about Sam in order to make the demon target their house in the first place, places an intense pressure upon Dean to keep Sam safe, both physically and spiritually. To a young Dean, it seems that his father’s entire opinion of him is tied up in how well Dean is a “good son”: how well he follows orders and how well he looks after Sam, to the detriment of anything that Dean himself might want from his life. While this is not the case, as John loves his son and acknowledges in the season two premiere that he has put burdens on Dean that were far too heavy for a child his age to bear, he only expresses this once before he dies in that same episode. (And he does it while putting yet another chore to Dean that no parent should ever ask of their child, which is why, in spite of some fantastic acting on the part of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, I can’t help but have a very low opinion of Daddy Winchester.) It’s still printed into Dean’s brain so deeply that it’s unlikely he’ll ever shake it off entirely that his purpose and worth in life is irrevocably tied up in how Sam is doing at the moment to an extent that Sam, who was so little that he doesn’t remember any other life than hunting and who was sheltered from a great deal by Dean’s role as protector, is never going to be able to match. He wants, more than anything else, to have a family. He wants to be loved.
A desire for family and love is a very normal, human thing that everyone experiences, but when put into that context it seems terribly depressing. I certainly would not find it appealing if someone was describing Dean Winchester to me in those terms; I would recommend that the gentleman in question find his way into some therapy and come talk to me again after he had gotten his head straightened out a bit. There’s no denying that Dean is not psychologically healthy. However, this is only a small part of what there is to Dean, and it’s a part of him that has only begun to receive steady attention from the writers over the past season and a half or so. The entire first season of the show is focused on Dean’s role as a Big Damned Hero, which he most assuredly is. The Dean that we see in those twenty or so episodes loves his brother and will do virtually anything in order to protect him, but he also loves his job as a hunter and the role that he takes in protecting other innocent people from the same things that he went through as a result of the demon’s attack. He nearly worships John and grows angry whenever Sam speaks badly of him, but he also loves his job just because he loves his job. Dean has a very black and white view of the world: there’s humans, and then there are Supernatural Things. Sometimes humans can be bad and have to be taken out (it’s interesting that, for all that Sam has rapidly become the more ruthless of the pair, it was Dean who first admitted the possibility that sometimes humans who dabbled in dark forces might just have to be killed), but Supernatural Things are always evil, and must always be killed. This worldview begins to be proven wrong to him almost immediately, as it turns out that Sam might be one of those supernatural beings himself in the show’s major mytharc. Dean has since grown to have a much more troubled relationship with all beings supernatural since his brother is both telekinetic and sometimes prone to visions, but he still has a very hardline view on good and evil: if it’s evil, we kill it, and if it’s good (or even not so good), we save it. He doesn’t even pause for the usual weighing of consequences before he leaps in front of a gun to save someone in 1.14-"Nightmares".
Now that we know that Dean is both deeply troubled and deeply heroic, there are the facets of his personality that just make him fun. He drinks fairly heavily when he’s “off the clock”, though not to the extent that John did and with an eye towards social fun rather than bitter brooding. He likes classic rock, classic cars, and sex. Dean really likes sex, and his promiscuity is one of the show’s big running jokes. It’s interesting to note that, in the first two seasons at least (and something that I dearly wish that the show would go back to), it was also clear that Dean just liked women, period. They were a strange and nearly exotic species to him, having grown up around so few of them and with the Legend of Mary, the whole reason for their family’s quest for vengeance, coming down from John, that Dean was fascinated by women qua women, and frequently didn’t know what he was supposed to make of them at all.
Except for having sex. Because, no, really, it cannot be denied: Dean Winchester is a slut.
He also has a snarky, wisecracking sense of humor that makes liberal use of pop culture references and a knee-jerk antagonistic response to any and all authority. Dean holds a fairly dim view of cops in general: they couldn’t save his mother and they can’t save people from the things that he fights, so in general they’re just a nuisance that gets in his way. (This is particularly ironic when one considers that Dean wanted to be a firefighter when he was growing up, also a job that’s appealing to those who want to save people and uphold order: for all that Dean plays at being an anarchist sometimes, he’s really not.) Thanks to a little incident with a shapeshifter in Baltimore early in the series and the stubborn refusal of both Winchesters to wear some freaking gloves when they’re traipsing around the scenes of all these grisly supernatural murders, the cops have a pretty dim view of Dean Winchester, too.
And that brings us to the other half of the pairing, one Victor Henriksen. Victor has only appeared in three episodes of the series thus far (yes, I am going to stubbornly say “thus far”, and you can’t stop me), so we don’t have nearly the amount of canon information to go on when it comes to him. He was first introduced in episode 2.12, “Nightshifter”, in which the boys have had to return to Baltimore in order to deal with another shapeshifter, this one who is using its abilities in order to steal from banks and jewelry stores. This shapeshifter kills the person it’s imitating and then uses that person’s form so that it can infiltrate their place of employment. Victor is an FBI agent who has been tracking Dean ever since the earlier incident in Baltimore, never mind that Dean and Sam killed the original shapeshifter while it was still wearing Dean’s face, so that to the eyes of the law he ought to have been dead. We clearly learn that Victor is smarter than that. In addition to being an FBI agent, and thus one of the most elite members of the law that Dean so loves to poke at, he’s simply a good man. He believes in law and order and, most of all, in saving people, to the point that later in the series he expresses a frustration to Dean that being tied up in an inter-office paperwork and bitching has stopped him from actually doing his job. He’s incredibly intelligent, incorruptible, and has no sympathy for people who have done the kinds of things that he believes Dean has done. They’re monsters; he stops them. That they have a greater claim as members of the human species than the monsters that Dean hunts is only a small detail. Remember, from early on in the series Dean has been willing to acknowledge that humans are capable of just as much ugliness as the actual supernatural creepies and crawlies.
And it has to be said: while we have no way of knowing how much Victor sleeps around or how much he drinks, he’s a smartass to a level that rivals Dean’s own fast mouth. He barely got through his very first scene in his very first episode before I was mouthing, “Oh, I love this man!”
The History:
“Nightshifter” is the first time that Dean and Victor make contact with each other, though they won’t actually meet face to face for a few more months. After journeying to Milwaukee in order to deal with the second shapeshifter, the job goes bad on Dean and Sam with a swiftness, leaving them trapped with a bank full of hostages that they did not actually want, dozens of angry cops outside, and a shapeshifter inside who’s hesitating to make its presence known. The last thing that they need is for an FBI agent who’s been stalking them for months without their notice to come swaggering in and taking over the situation (neatly alienating the local police as he does so), but that’s exactly what Victor does. Dean takes a phone call with the police in which they’re supposed to be negotiating terms: Victor takes charge of that, too, and he and Dean wind up having this conversation:
DEAN: Yeah.
VICTOR: This is Special Agent Victor Henriksen.
DEAN: Yeah, listen, I’m not really in a negotiating mood right now-
VICTOR: Good, me neither. It’s my job to bring you in: alive’s a bonus, but not neccessary.
DEAN: Whoa, that’s kind of harsh for a federal agent, don’t you think?
VICTOR: Well, you’re not the typical suspect, are you, Dean? (As the camera breaks away to focus on Dean’s stunned face.) I want you and Sam out here, now, or we come in. And, yes, I know about Sam, too, Bonnie to your Clyde.
DEAN: Hey, well, that part’s true, but how’d you even know we were here?
VICTOR: Go screw yourself, that’s how I knew. It’s become my job to know about you Dean. I’ve been looking for you for weeks. I know about the murder in St. Louis, I know about the Houdini act you pulled in Baltimore, I know about the desecrations and the thefts. I know about your dad.
DEAN (visibly shaken): You don’t know crap about my dad.
VICTOR: Ex-Marine, raised his kids on the road, cheap motels, backwoods cabins? Real paramilitary survivalist type. I just can’t get a handle on what kind of whacko he was. White supremacist, Timmy McVeigh, tomato, tom-ah-to.
Dean (and it’s worth noting at this point that Dean has started to do the faux-friendly hostile smile that he gets right before he kicks someone’s ass): You got no right talking about my dad like that. He was a hero.
VICTOR: Yeah, right. Sure sounds like it. You have one hour to come out those doors or we come in, full automatic. (He hangs up. Dean pauses to lower his head for a second, all “Oh, fuck.”)
It turns out that Victor’s lying about the hour, too; he wants men in there within five minutes. While this seems as if he’s playing hardball with too much willingness at first glance, he does it because he knows that Dean and Sam are dangerous, even if he does not know which side they’re actually on. He does it because he took one glance at the situation and realized that Dean and Sam are not the bank-robbing type, so they’re not doing this for the money and therefore there must be something else within the bank that they want. As there was no way at this point for Victor to know that what they wanted was to hunt down a shapeshifter similar to the one responsible for bringing the FBI down on Dean in the first place, his next best guess is that they’re there so that Dean can give vent to what looks like an insatiable need to kill. Out of everyone there, he is the only one who seems to really understand how dangerous the Winchesters, and Dean in particular, actually are.
And let’s talk about the conversation itself, shall we? It mostly tells us about Victor, as we’ve had a full season and a half thus far, to learn about Dean, but oh, man, the things that it contains in less than a page of dialogue. We learn that Victor is smart. We learn that he’s incredibly good at his job. We learn that he’s an incredible smartass who has absolutely no respect for things that cross that line and start to kill; he believes that he’s hunting monsters every bit as much as Dean does. In short, he is Dean in a lot of key ways, and it’s clear by how visibly shaken Dean is at the end of their conversation that Dean knows it, too. He was able to dissect Dean’s entire, messed-up life within the span of thirty seconds; it was brilliant.
I won’t lie to you. I fell in love with Victor in that moment, and I haven’t stopped since.
The Winchesters get away, of course, or there would no longer be a series (but reams of opportunity for cameos on Prison Break). “We’re screwed,” seems to be Dean’s opinion on the matter as the boys sit in their stolen SWAT gear outside. He knows a good hunter when he meets one, being a good hunter himself, and he knows that Victor is going to be a force to be reckoned with from that point forward.
As fantastic as the phone call was, it’s nothing compared to the moment when Dean and Victor finally meet face to face, months later in “Folsom Prison Blues.” Dean and Sam set out to get themselves caught by the FBI so that they will be thrown into a certain Arizona prison until extradition, where they plan on exorcising a ghost that’s been terrorizing it and then escaping themselves. (Small note: you really have to pause and admire a set of hunters so good that they deliberately get themselves thrown into prison with every intention of breaking right out again.) Victor arrives to interrogate both Winchesters, and his conversation with Dean goes something like this:
VICTOR: You think you’re funny?
DEAN: I think I’m adorable.
VICTOR: It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Dean. I’m Special Agent Victor Henriksen, and this is my partner, Special Agent Reidy.
DEAN: Henriksen? Not the Milwaukee Henriksen.
VICTOR: Live and in person. (Displaying a picture of Dean from the bank.) Aww, nice shot. You can hang that up in your cell at Super Max.
DEAN: All right, maybe we can just forget the cheeseburgers, yeah.
VICTOR: Yeah, keep that game face on. Try to cover up how cornered you are. Read him the charges.
REID: Well, we got mail fraud, credit card fraud, grave desecration--
VICTOR: Skip to the good ones.
REIDY: Well, we’ve got armed robbery, kidnapping and, oh, yeah: three counts of first degree murder.
VICTOR: And after Milwaukee, your brother is a suspect in a murder case himself. I’d say that for you two, “Screwed to hell” is a major understatement.
DEAN: Well, where there’s life there’s hope, huh?
VICTOR: See, that’s what I kept thinking as I was searching for your asses all over hell and gone. (Getting up in Dean’s face, and Dean gets just the faintest trace of that “about to pop the hell out of you” smirk of his.) Your dad taught you well. The way that you covered your tracks, and the after Milwaukee, the way that you just--*whistles*--vanished. Near went nuts trying to find out. Ask him.
REIDY: He near went nuts.
VICTOR: And after all of that, you get tripped up on a motion detector. Pretty rookie move. Gotta say, I was--surprised.
Dean’s public defender interrupts before Victor can go further, but one gets the sense from the way that the conversation ended that Victor’s brain was already moving ahead, wondering what lay behind the rookie mistake. He doesn’t cooperate with the PD later in the episode, to my mind, less because she’s suggesting that there are things about the Winchester case that doesn’t make sense and more because she’s raising her objections based upon Dean’s making doe eyes at her. Victor is a man of reason and science, and he doesn’t truck well at all with that brand of nonsense. (If I wasn’t already in love with the man, the moment in which he dryly tells her that “grown-ups are trying to work here” would have surely won me over.) The most important thing to note in this scene is the absolute respect that Dean and Victor pay each other. Most of the dialogue is Victor’s, as Dean sits back in his supposed disadvantage and reviews the antagonist that he’s only getting to meet face to face for the first time, but he recognizes Victor’s name immediately. Outside of a single amused glance Reid’s way at “He near went nuts,” he doesn’t take his eyes off of Victor once. And Victor, for his part, does the same, acknowledging in Dean a great mind at work in order to stay ahead for that long. A great mind in the service of evil, which is why I don’t think that any Victor/Dean is plausible until Victor is shown how the world really functions, but he does not for one single, solitary second in the course of the series take Dean for a fool. After Milwaukee, neither does Dean do the same for Victor: they are two men who meet each other absolutely acknowledging that the other is his equal in competence and overall badassery.
The Winchesters get away again, of course. This time, rather than impersonating members of a SWAT team, they use the help of their public defender to mislead Victor and his men to an entirely different cemetery than the one where they actually need to perform the necessary exorcism. One can only imagine how much stewing Victor does over the near-year it takes for us to meet him again.
When Victor finally catches up with Dean and Sam again, he does so because Dean’s nemesis, Bela, has tipped him off as to their location in order to throw Dean off of her trail for a little while longer. The Winchesters are arrested and thrown into a local jail to await their transfer to a high-security federal prison for trial; Victor has learned his lesson from the last time. The only problem with his plan is that the army of demons that has been pursuing Sam all season has finally decided to strike at him en masse-and they’ll possess anyone that they have to in order to do it. Dean and Sam do their best to alert Victor to this fact, only to fall on deaf ears, even when Victor’s possessed boss tries to shoot both of them within their cell and is exorcised in return (releasing the demon into the air to mingle with those outside rather than sending him back to hell). It’s not something that a man of fingerprints and DNA evidence believes in without hard proof; it is important to keep in mind that these are the tricks of Victor’s trade every bit as much as rock salt and silver bullets are the tricks of Dean’s. Luckily for Dean and Sam, Victor finds his way over to their side soon enough, as he’s the very next of them to be possessed by a demon. Dean and Sam are expecting this turn of events, however, and have used a rosary stolen from the station’s Catholic secretary to turn their toilet into holy water. They exorcise the demon from Victor, but not before he kills the sheriff.
Victor is a man of reason, and after being given such indisputable proof as to the things that were bumping around the night without his notice, he’s quick to join the boys’ side. As he aids in preparing for the inevitable onslaught against the station, he and Dean talk again. This time, their conversation is amicable, with Dean saying that, while he doesn’t think that he and Sam can stop the apocalypse forever, there’s a nobility in fighting it all the same. This is a sentiment that resonates with Victor very strongly, which makes sense when you consider who many violent crimes actually go unsolved. Having been shown becoming frustrated with the paperwork and nonsense that kept him from being able to do his job and protect people earlier in the episode, he now says that he would not mind joining Sam and Dean in fighting this new kind of evil that he’s discovered.
The body language is markedly different between them in every aspect but one: the respect that was between them even while Victor thought that Dean was a wholehearted monster is still there, but the men themselves are now starting to realize that they are two sides of the same coin. There’s a sense in the air that Victor will be stumbling his way towards becoming a hunter himself as soon as the mess in the station is put to bed, and that he and Dean will even be friends after this battle is put to rest.
The demons attack, but are repelled due to some quick thinking on the part of Sam: he tapes an exorcism ritual and then Victor plays it over the station’s PA system, so that every demon within hearing range is driven out of the body that it’s inhabiting at once. Victor thinks that maybe Dean and Sam were “killed” in a fire that destroyed the helicopter which had come to collect them earlier; he thinks that their bodies were burned so badly that it’s impossible to even identify the corpses through dental records. After over a year of running, Dean in particular is quick to accept this gift.
Unluckily for fans of both Victor as a character and Dean/Victor as a ‘ship, however, his final episode ends on a sour note. While Victor, the remaining deputies, and the secretary are cleaning up the station, a very young girl enters the station. She’s Lilith, a rival to Sam’s eventual leadership of the demonic horde, and she’s not pleased to find that her prey has escaped her. We see Victor wheeling towards her as he recognizes her name, and then the screen goes white. We then cut to Dean and Sam watching a news bulletin in which it appears that everyone within the station was killed.
Why They Work, and a Possible History for the Ship:
Dean and Victor are both fundamentally good men, which is a big part of why they work and something important to keep in mind while writing them. Though Dean has become rather overwhelmed with his personal life over the past season and a half, he entered hunting as a profession in the first place because he enjoys helping people and stopping the bad guys. Guess what? That was why Victor entered law enforcement, as well, and a big part of his frustration with his job is the perception that he spends more time dotting i’s and crossing t’s than he does finding monsters. They have chosen different methods of enacting their goals, but the end is fundamentally the same: save people, and stop the things that would harm them. Everything that kept them from becoming allies with one another was a strictly external factor; based upon internal ones, they ought to have gotten along famously, as they did at the end of Victor’s final episode. Dean and Victor are interesting because they look they ought to be an adversarial, hate sex kind of ship and yet they’re not; they’re really the kind of men more likely to be beer buddies with each other. More importantly, it is because they’re both good men that they can’t be an adversarial ship: Victor would have nothing to do with Dean, thinking that he was a serial killer, and Dean’s baiting of Victor occurs precisely because he knows that Victor is a decent man doing a good job. (This season in particular has shown how Dean reacts when he’s confronting people for whom he has an inherent disrespect, and he’s much more vicious.) They’re good men, doing good work. They both want to help people, and they both get frustrated when entangling red tape prevents them from doing so. And they are both-and this is my very favorite thing about them-utter smart alecks. Any fic featuring the two of them in a romantic or sexual context would have to feature a lot of sassing each other, and a lot of endearments delivered under the guise of insults. That’s why they’re fun.
The future of the ship is up in the air right now for one very obvious reason: Victor is presumed dead. It’s ironic that the one episode that got people to seeing the clear level of subtext between the two of them (previously it had been only myself and a handful of other crazy souls) was the one in which Kripke apparently decided to kill him off. I say “presumed” and “apparently” because the shot itself was very arty and vague: there was some slo-mo, a white light, and then we cut to the news broadcast. Without ever seeing a body, and at the end of an episode in which Victor deliberately mentioned fire as a means of faking a death, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Kripke still has something up his sleeve. If it is just wishful thinking, however, then the very vagueness of the way that Victor died leaves room for the fannish writer to resurrect him and set him on the path to becoming the hunter that he was considering becoming at the time of his death.
Resources and Fics:
There has been very little Dean/Victor fic written, for reasons that I alluded to above: Victor died at the end of the first ep in which there was blatant Dean/Victor subtext, rather than little tastes. However, there have been a few gems, and reams of good Victor gen pieces to whet the appetites of those who would like to take it further. Firstly, the only explicitly Dean/Victor fic that I’ve been able to find:
Cops and Robbers by minim_calibre is an amazing Dean/Victor fic that’s heavy on plot, snark, and the amazing parallels that do exist between them.
Barring that, there have been several fics that feature Dean and Victor interacting with each other or just wandering around being awesome separately:
A Just Cause takes place immediately after “Jus Ad Bello”, is written by smilla02, and is now my personal canon. The end.
Gift. Victor turns out to have powers. Lovely.
Always Some Door Open by dotfic. You know what really makes a fandom awesome? Body-swap.
Cops and Robbers. If I’m allowed to pimp my own work here, that is. Victor figures it out.