Age(s) of the Geek, 6/7 - Leverage / Supernatural crossover
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Age(s) of the Geek, chapter 6: Leverage / Supernatural, part 2.
Summary: A demon tried to abduct Alec Hardison, and succeeded in taking his identical twin Jake. But why does Alec's desperate search for answers lead him to a roadhouse in Nebraska?
Genre: gen AU crossover.
Rating / Warnings: R for angst, non-graphic violence, and canonical character death.
Word count: 4,000 words.
Spoilers: minor spoilers for the pilot of Leverage; spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Supernatural, and seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy.
Author's notes: this is the second-to-last in my series of interconnected Leverage crossovers, all focusing on Alec Hardison and his encounters with fellow geeks from various TV shows. It won't make much sense unless you read the previous installments (or at least Chapter 5) first:
Chapter 1 (Buffy crossover)
Chapter 2 (Veronica Mars crossover)
Chapter 3 (Doctor Who crossover)
Chapter 4 (Heroes crossover, part 1)
Chapter 5 (Supernatural crossover, part 1)
***
Alec Hardison and Ash, 2007 - 2008
Alec sat on the stoop outside Nana's old house in Atlanta, deaf to the noise of neighborhood kids playing on the sidewalk. The May afternoon was warm, but the heat couldn't touch the cold fear inside him. Head in his hands, eyes closed against the bright sunshine, he kept going over recent events again and again in his mind.
Nana's death in February had been hard to accept, but at least it was a finite fact. Alec had been at her bedside hours before she passed, attended her funeral, and mourned at her grave.
When it came to his twin brother, though, nothing was certain. A week ago, Jake Talley had simply vanished from a tent in a desolate Afghanistan valley. The Army assumed he was AWOL, and had either died or been captured by enemy forces. But Alec feared that a very different hostile force was at work: the yellow-eyed demon, who'd also tried to abduct Alec on the same day.
Alec had deployed all his criminal and computer skills since then, without success. He couldn't find any trace of Jake, dead or alive. The demon could have transported him anywhere in the world - or maybe even to Hell. There was no way for Alec to narrow down the parameters, and no trail of clues to follow.
He had turned to his old friend Willow for help, of course. Although she was still traveling in South America, her magic was powerful enough to span the globe. But even she hadn't been able to locate his brother. That didn't necessarily mean he was dead, Willow assured Alec over a crackly phone line from Peru. Jake could still be alive, and somehow shielded from her searching spells.
***
Alec had also planned to ask a newer friend for assistance: Ash, the guy who'd originally prompted him to start digging into his own past. But he'd stopped logging onto the forums around the time Jake disappeared. He hadn't answered his emails, either, not even the message where Alec admitted to being one of the 23-year-olds that Ash was looking for.
Alec might have assumed that Ash was pissed at him for not coming clean earlier...except that he definitely didn't seem the silent treatment type. And if Nana's friend Louise was right about the demon giving special powers to a bunch of kids born in 1983, and now kidnapping them, then maybe Ash had gotten too close to the truth in his research. So there was good reason to think that the timing of this week-long silence wasn't a coincidence - and good reason to be worried as hell.
Alec didn't know the guy's last name, or where he lived; he'd disguised his IP address so well that even Alec couldn't trace his location. But he knew that Ash was involved in the fight against paranormal phenomena. So Alec had paid close attention to his message boards over the last few days.
His hunch had paid off late last night. Someone had posted about the recent destruction of a roadside saloon in rural Nebraska, which was frequented by self-styled "hunters" of supernatural creatures.
A minute's googling confirmed that Harvelle's Roadhouse had been burnt to the ground, the day after the demon had paid his painful visit to Alec in Chicago and Jake in Afghanistan. Arson was suspected, but the local authorities hadn't ruled out an accidental gas leak - a strong sulfuric smell still hung around the site. Alec, who knew that sulfur could indicate the presence of demons, wasn't at all reassured by this news.
One of the bodies found in the ruins had been identified as Ashton Sinclair. Alec had spent this morning investigating, going so far as to hack into MIT's enrolment records. He'd proved beyond doubt that the late Ashton was the Ash he'd met online. It was one more piece of bad news to top off a truly shitty week.
Alec got up off the stoop, and went inside to grab his laptop. He had some bookings to make.
***
Alec got a flight to Omaha the next morning, then hired a car to head out to Nowhere, Nebraska. He didn't know what he hoped to find, exactly, but he had to do something. His foster-sisters were getting sick of him moping about the house, especially since he'd refused to tell them why he was so stressed and depressed.
Sheena had put him to work doing home maintenance, which at least kept his body usefully occupied. His brain was always churning away, though, and he was only getting a few hours of restless sleep per night. He felt worn down and worn out.
The burnt-out roadhouse was in the process of being demolished when Alec drove up. There was nobody else around except a middle-aged woman with dark blonde hair, leaning against a pick-up truck in the parking lot and grimly watching the bulldozer work. He'd seen her picture in the news reports - this was Ellen Harvelle, Ash's landlord and employer.
If she ran a hunters' hangout, Alec figured she must know about supernatural stuff. Maybe she would have some answers for him.
He walked across the parking lot to Mrs. Harvelle, and opened his mouth to introduce himself. But her expression made the words catch in his throat: she looked horrified to see him. Without taking her eyes off his face, she reached for the shotgun lying on the pick-up's passenger seat, pumped it, and aimed it at his chest.
Alec froze, stunned and seriously confused. Had he wandered into some kind of white supremacist stronghold, or was this woman just crazy?
"Jake! How can you be back?" she demanded. "I watched those boys salt and burn your corpse."
Alec's mind reeled at hearing, point-blank, that his twin was dead. He'd sought answers, but not like this...
"Oh God, no," he gasped, putting a hand out to support himself against the side of the truck. It was stupid to make a sudden movement when faced with an armed woman whose hands were shaking, but right then Alec didn't care if she shot him.
The roadhouse owner frowned. "Christo," she exclaimed, and studied his reaction while Alec just stared back at her. Then she lowered her weapon slightly, and said, "Well, I'll be damned. Who are you?"
"Alec Hardison," he croaked. "I'm Jake Talley's twin."
"And how on earth did you wind up here?"
He'd had a whole introductory speech prepared, about chatting with Ash online and hoping to find out what happened to him. But in his state of shock, all he could say was, "Ash."
Her expression bleak, Mrs. Harvelle nodded at the charred wreckage of her business and home. "He was found in there - that answer your question?"
"Was it the demon?" Alec asked.
She looked at him sharply. "Yeah, it was." Then, to his relief, she flicked the safety on and put the shotgun back in the truck. "I'm Ellen," she said. "We need to talk. There's a diner five miles down the road; I'll meet you there."
***
It was the middle of a weekday afternoon, and the diner was deserted except for some truckers playing cards in a back booth. Alec and Ellen sat by the dusty front window, under a ceiling fan that creaked as it turned. He sipped soda and toyed with a slice of apple pie, not really hungry, while she topped up her strong black coffee with liquor from a flask.
"Sorry about earlier," Ellen said, "but it's been one hell of a week and I'm more than a little rattled. So how about you tell me what you know about Jake and the demon, and I'll fill in the gaps."
Alec laid it all out for her, as he had done for Louise a few days earlier. Ellen listened intently, asking questions here and there. When he explained about Nana's friend using magic to anchor him, Ellen looked impressed. She inspected his wrists, where the demon's red blisters and Louise's pale finger marks were fading but still visible.
"I wish we'd known about that spell," she sighed. "It sure would've helped Sam and Dean."
In response to Alec's questioning look, Ellen said that Sam Winchester was one of the 1983 kids and Dean was his older brother. Alec nodded, recognizing the name from his forums - the Winchesters were famous among hunters.
Sam had been abducted by the yellow-eyed demon a week ago, she continued, and taken to a ghost town in South Dakota. There, he met four other 23-year-olds with psychic powers...including Jake.
"You sure you want to hear this? It doesn't end well for your brother," Ellen warned him.
Alec took a deep breath. "I know, but I have to understand what happened. Not knowing would be worse," he said firmly.
Ellen only told him the bare bones, but it was bad enough. The demon had tried to turn his five captives against each other. It sounded like Survivor, except that the eliminated contestants died in horrible ways.
Jake had initially been Sam Winchester's ally, but the demon had appeared in a dream and convinced him that there could only be one winner. So Jake had attacked Sam, using his super-strength to his advantage. Drilled in fighting techniques since childhood, Sam had gained the upper hand just as Dean arrived to rescue him.
As Sam was staggering towards Dean, and freedom, Jake stabbed him in the back and then ran off. Sam had died in his brother's arms.
Alec winced at hearing this, shaking his head. He'd known that his twin had killed people before, as a soldier, but this was so much worse.
"Wait," he said suddenly. "If Sam died, how come you know what happened before Dean got there?"
"Because Sam didn't stay dead," she replied.
Alec blinked at Ellen, surprised by her matter-of-fact tone. "What, so he's a zombie now? Or a vampire?"
"No, nothing like that," she reassured him hastily. "Sam's alive, and still human, but you're better off not knowing the details as to how. Just thinking about it makes me sick."
Feeling nauseous already, he let it slide. "OK. So how did you meet Jake?"
Ellen explained that she'd been away from the roadhouse when it was torched by demons - it seemed that Ash's work in tracking a sudden shift in demonic activity had attracted their attention. The guy was too smart for his own good, Alec thought sadly. Then she'd traveled to another hunter's home base and met up with the Winchesters. Together, they'd worked out what the yellow-eyed demon wanted Jake to do.
A trail of omens led them to an abandoned pioneer cemetery in Wyoming, where they found Jake opening a portal to Hell. Ellen's voice shook as she described Jake using his newly-developed telekinesis to force her own gun against her temple.
Shit, Alec thought, no wonder she'd looked so afraid when he'd approached her in the parking lot. What a nightmare.
Sam had shot Jake in the back, repaying the favor, then Dean had killed the yellow-eyed demon. But hundreds of demons were released into the world before the hunters got the portal closed again.
Alec held his head in his hands, staring down at the table, as Ellen finished telling her story. He didn't want to believe that his twin was a bad guy, but the evidence was pretty damning.
He couldn't help wondering what would have happened without Louise's intervention. If the demon had reunited him with Jake in South Dakota, would Alec have resisted the temptation of psychic powers? And if it had come down to just the two of them, would Jake have killed him in order to win? Or could they have joined forces to combat the demon?
Some of what Alec was thinking must have shown in his face, because Ellen reached across the table and touched his arm. He looked up.
"I know that What if? look," she said quietly, her expression sympathetic. "You can drive yourself crazy with hypotheticals after a death. But you can't change what happened, and you can't bring your brother back. Give yourself time to grieve, then try to let him go."
***
Alec exchanged contact details with Ellen, agreeing to let her know if anything else unusual happened to him. Then he set out west, for Wyoming. He didn't normally like wide open spaces; he was a city boy at heart. But driving along the straight interstate was a welcome relief, when his thoughts were so tangled and twisted.
After spending the night in a Cheyenne hotel, Alec followed Ellen's directions to the remote cowboy graveyard the next morning. To his relief, an early summer storm had already washed Jake's blood away. The only visible sign of the traumatic events Ellen had described was a large patch of disturbed soil. Jake and the yellow-eyed demon's vessel were buried here, side by side, in the first grave dug in the old cemetery for many decades.
Alec picked up some fallen branches, and hammered the sturdiest one into the ground with his tire jack. He used rope from the rental car's trunk to lash a shorter piece of wood to the longer one, forming a cross. He didn't know which side of the shared plot Jake was buried in, but it didn't matter...the poor bastard possessed by the demon deserved a memorial too.
He wished he could retrieve his brother's dog tags, to keep for himself or return to Jake's family down in Alabama. But even that small memento was lost to him. Ellen had told him that any personal object belonging to a deceased person could become haunted by their spirit. So the Winchesters had melted down the dog tags and all the other items Jake had on him, burying them with his incinerated remains.
Standing over the grave, Alec bowed his head and wiped away tears. It was awful to think that this was the closest he would ever get to his twin, after 23 years of unknowing separation. But at least he had learnt the truth about what had happened; at least he could say goodbye.
***
After his return to Atlanta, it was a couple more weeks before Alec felt strong enough to reach out to his brother's family. The Army had informed Jake's adoptive mother and sister that he was missing, of course, but Alec was pretty certain that they hadn't been told about the mysterious circumstances. And they sure as hell didn't know that Jake had been shot dead in Wyoming...by the guy he'd killed a few days before that, in South Dakota.
Alec had mixed feelings about contacting Mrs. Talley. He figured that she deserved to know that her boy was dead, so she wouldn't go on hoping in vain. But how could he possibly prove it? In the end, he wrote a short letter saying that he was her son's long-lost identical twin, had heard about Jake's disappearance, and wanted to meet his family.
He hadn't known what reaction to expect. But Jake's mom immediately invited him down to Birmingham, and welcomed him with open arms. Sitting next to her on the living room sofa was a weird experience for Alec; there were pictures of Jake everywhere, ranging from baby photos to a formal portrait in his Army uniform. And he was sure that meeting a stranger with her son's face was pretty surreal for Mrs. Talley too.
Jake's teenaged sister Danielle had burst into tears as soon as she saw Alec, running upstairs and slamming her door. Her mother had apologized, embarrassed, but Alec didn't blame the girl at all. The whole situation was fucked up.
It was hard for Alec to explain how he'd found out about Jake in the first place, without revealing his criminal misuse of federal databases. He just said that he'd been wondering about his birth family, and had discovered evidence that he and his brother had been separated as infants and sent to different foster homes.
Apparently the Talleys were never told that their adopted son had a twin, so Alec was pretty sure that Jake had no idea either. That was strangely comforting; it would have hurt to learn that Jake knew of Alec's existence, but hadn't tried to find him.
Then came the hardest part.
Alec put down his glass of tea and said, as gently as he could, "Mrs. Talley, I don't want to cause you any further pain. But I feel, in my heart, that Jake is gone. I can't explain it...I just know."
He was prepared to lie if she questioned him, claiming some psychic twin link, but he didn't have to.
"I know," Mrs. Talley replied, "I feel it too. Mother's intuition, maybe?" Then her composure broke, and she began to cry. Alec reached out tentatively, to put his hand over hers, but she leaned forward and rested her head against his shoulder.
So he wrapped his arms around Jake's mom, and grieved with her.
***
Alec had confided everything to Willow, of course - if there was anyone who could understand the shit he'd been through recently, it was her. He also passed on Ellen's information to Louise, letting her know what had happened to the other 1983 kids that her Christian network had been monitoring.
But he decided never to tell anyone else about Jake, let alone about the yellow-eyed demon. It was too private, too painful, and who would believe him anyway? He knew he should take Ellen's advice, and put the whole mess behind him.
Still, he did think long and hard about trying to find the Winchester brothers. They were obviously pretty good at covering their tracks, if the FBI had been chasing them for so long, but Alec had faith in his own skills. What good would it do to meet them, though? He would only hear more about his brother's betrayal of Sam, his cruelty to Ellen, and his role in opening the gate to Hell. And even if Sam did kill Jake, Alec owed Dean for killing the demon that had tormented him for months. In some weird sense, they were even.
Anyway, Alec wasn't sure that the Winchesters wouldn't just shoot him on sight, and check his ID later. It was probably best to leave them alone; they had plenty of work to do, hunting down all those demons that Jake had released.
***
Alec returned to Chicago, packing up and moving out of his apartment. He didn't sign another lease right away, though. Instead, he put his belongings into storage and went traveling.
Willow had suggested that he get away from familiar people and places for a while. Moving to England after Tara's death had really helped her come to terms with her loss and reassess her life, she said.
Alec took Willow's advice, and decided to take most of the next year off to see the world. He'd never left the US before, so he forged passports to match several of his squeaky-clean aliases. First he went to WorldCon in Japan, which was an epic multicultural geek-fest (and a huge amount of fun). After that, he traveled through Asia and the Middle East to Europe. He visited incredible places, but also witnessed terrible suffering which helped put his own troubles in some kind of perspective.
While he didn't want to give up crime altogether, Alec felt like he had to do something useful with the proceeds - and maybe atone for Jake's sins in some small way. So he started giving large sums of money away as he traveled. Nana had always supported her church's missionary work, even when she was struggling financially. Since Alec didn't share that devout faith, he decided to support NGOs doing development work in the poorer countries that he passed through.
He had a chance to do some good closer to home as well. In one of her regular emails, Mrs. Talley mentioned that she might lose her house without Jake's Army paycheck to supplement her income. So Alec offered to pay off her mortgage. Mrs. Talley was reluctant to accept charity, but he convinced her that he could afford it and that he wanted to help. He also set up a college fund for Jake's sister Danielle, who was apparently showing real promise in her high school language classes.
When he returned to Chicago in the spring, he moved into a new apartment. Then he eased back into things gradually, taking just a few select jobs that piqued his interest.
It took him a while to settle back into his old life, for the obvious reasons but also for an unexpected one: his extra-special technological capability was gone. It had kicked in when he was 22, around the time his nightmares had started, so it made sense that it had started to fade away after the demon's death.
The downgrade was actually a relief, in a way. It had freaked him out to have demon-bestowed powers. He preferred his usual skill level, which he had built up over time through study and hard work. He didn't mind just being incredibly talented, rather than impossibly brilliant.
Alec was still good enough to crack almost any kind of computer security, and he still enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspect of professional hacking. But he'd lost much of his competitive drive to be the world's best cyber-criminal...that pressing desire for success which had inspired him for so long.
What was the point? He already had more cash than he needed, and could easily get more. Anyway, it had never been about the profit for him, not really. Giving money away helped him feel a little better, but there was still something missing.
***
An unusual contract got Alec's attention late that summer. It was a corporate espionage job, with a twist: a senior guy at one aerospace company claimed that a competitor had stolen his airplane designs, and was hiring a crew to steal them back.
Alec's task would be to break into the competitor's R&D room, copy the data, and destroy the system and all the back-ups. Even with his diminished skills, he could probably do it one-handed after pulling a WoW all-nighter.
So far, so whatever...the intriguing part was his temporary teammates. Alec had heard of the thief who went by the single name Parker - she was a legend among criminals. But he'd never met her, or even seen a picture. It would be interesting to find out if she was as crazy as her reputation suggested.
"Retrieval specialist" (whatever the hell that meant) Eliot Spencer was even more of a mystery. His name was an alias, of course, but it was an impressively solid one; only an expert like Alec could pick those documents as fake. He would bet that Spencer's identity had been created by the military, or some government agency with a three-letter name.
And the really interesting part, which he found out just days before the crew convened, was that Nathan Ford would mastermind the whole operation. The brilliant insurance investigator was still the only authority figure who had ever caught Alec. But his life had imploded since then, and he'd lost his job at IYS. Now he was apparently freelancing in a morally gray kind of way.
Nate Ford, heading a team of thieves? Alec would have taken the contract just to see what happened; hell, he would have done it for free. The $300,000 he'd been offered was the icing on the cake.
Anyway, the job was going down right here in Chicago. If everything went to plan, Alec would be home and in bed long before dawn.
Getting his gear together before the team meet-up, he planned his approach. It'd be pointless to use an alias this time: Ford already knew his real name. Alec would introduce himself to the others as Hardison, though...no need to be on a first-name basis for a one-off job.
Alec slung his bag over one shoulder, switched the lights off, and left his apartment. It was nice out tonight, and he had plenty of time. After choosing a favorite playlist on his iPod, he began to walk to the rendezvous point downtown.
***
Chapter 7
Age(s) of the Geek, chapter 6: Leverage / Supernatural, part 2.
Summary: A demon tried to abduct Alec Hardison, and succeeded in taking his identical twin Jake. But why does Alec's desperate search for answers lead him to a roadhouse in Nebraska?
Genre: gen AU crossover.
Rating / Warnings: R for angst, non-graphic violence, and canonical character death.
Word count: 4,000 words.
Spoilers: minor spoilers for the pilot of Leverage; spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Supernatural, and seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy.
Author's notes: this is the second-to-last in my series of interconnected Leverage crossovers, all focusing on Alec Hardison and his encounters with fellow geeks from various TV shows. It won't make much sense unless you read the previous installments (or at least Chapter 5) first:
Chapter 1 (Buffy crossover)
Chapter 2 (Veronica Mars crossover)
Chapter 3 (Doctor Who crossover)
Chapter 4 (Heroes crossover, part 1)
Chapter 5 (Supernatural crossover, part 1)
***
Alec Hardison and Ash, 2007 - 2008
Alec sat on the stoop outside Nana's old house in Atlanta, deaf to the noise of neighborhood kids playing on the sidewalk. The May afternoon was warm, but the heat couldn't touch the cold fear inside him. Head in his hands, eyes closed against the bright sunshine, he kept going over recent events again and again in his mind.
Nana's death in February had been hard to accept, but at least it was a finite fact. Alec had been at her bedside hours before she passed, attended her funeral, and mourned at her grave.
When it came to his twin brother, though, nothing was certain. A week ago, Jake Talley had simply vanished from a tent in a desolate Afghanistan valley. The Army assumed he was AWOL, and had either died or been captured by enemy forces. But Alec feared that a very different hostile force was at work: the yellow-eyed demon, who'd also tried to abduct Alec on the same day.
Alec had deployed all his criminal and computer skills since then, without success. He couldn't find any trace of Jake, dead or alive. The demon could have transported him anywhere in the world - or maybe even to Hell. There was no way for Alec to narrow down the parameters, and no trail of clues to follow.
He had turned to his old friend Willow for help, of course. Although she was still traveling in South America, her magic was powerful enough to span the globe. But even she hadn't been able to locate his brother. That didn't necessarily mean he was dead, Willow assured Alec over a crackly phone line from Peru. Jake could still be alive, and somehow shielded from her searching spells.
***
Alec had also planned to ask a newer friend for assistance: Ash, the guy who'd originally prompted him to start digging into his own past. But he'd stopped logging onto the forums around the time Jake disappeared. He hadn't answered his emails, either, not even the message where Alec admitted to being one of the 23-year-olds that Ash was looking for.
Alec might have assumed that Ash was pissed at him for not coming clean earlier...except that he definitely didn't seem the silent treatment type. And if Nana's friend Louise was right about the demon giving special powers to a bunch of kids born in 1983, and now kidnapping them, then maybe Ash had gotten too close to the truth in his research. So there was good reason to think that the timing of this week-long silence wasn't a coincidence - and good reason to be worried as hell.
Alec didn't know the guy's last name, or where he lived; he'd disguised his IP address so well that even Alec couldn't trace his location. But he knew that Ash was involved in the fight against paranormal phenomena. So Alec had paid close attention to his message boards over the last few days.
His hunch had paid off late last night. Someone had posted about the recent destruction of a roadside saloon in rural Nebraska, which was frequented by self-styled "hunters" of supernatural creatures.
A minute's googling confirmed that Harvelle's Roadhouse had been burnt to the ground, the day after the demon had paid his painful visit to Alec in Chicago and Jake in Afghanistan. Arson was suspected, but the local authorities hadn't ruled out an accidental gas leak - a strong sulfuric smell still hung around the site. Alec, who knew that sulfur could indicate the presence of demons, wasn't at all reassured by this news.
One of the bodies found in the ruins had been identified as Ashton Sinclair. Alec had spent this morning investigating, going so far as to hack into MIT's enrolment records. He'd proved beyond doubt that the late Ashton was the Ash he'd met online. It was one more piece of bad news to top off a truly shitty week.
Alec got up off the stoop, and went inside to grab his laptop. He had some bookings to make.
***
Alec got a flight to Omaha the next morning, then hired a car to head out to Nowhere, Nebraska. He didn't know what he hoped to find, exactly, but he had to do something. His foster-sisters were getting sick of him moping about the house, especially since he'd refused to tell them why he was so stressed and depressed.
Sheena had put him to work doing home maintenance, which at least kept his body usefully occupied. His brain was always churning away, though, and he was only getting a few hours of restless sleep per night. He felt worn down and worn out.
The burnt-out roadhouse was in the process of being demolished when Alec drove up. There was nobody else around except a middle-aged woman with dark blonde hair, leaning against a pick-up truck in the parking lot and grimly watching the bulldozer work. He'd seen her picture in the news reports - this was Ellen Harvelle, Ash's landlord and employer.
If she ran a hunters' hangout, Alec figured she must know about supernatural stuff. Maybe she would have some answers for him.
He walked across the parking lot to Mrs. Harvelle, and opened his mouth to introduce himself. But her expression made the words catch in his throat: she looked horrified to see him. Without taking her eyes off his face, she reached for the shotgun lying on the pick-up's passenger seat, pumped it, and aimed it at his chest.
Alec froze, stunned and seriously confused. Had he wandered into some kind of white supremacist stronghold, or was this woman just crazy?
"Jake! How can you be back?" she demanded. "I watched those boys salt and burn your corpse."
Alec's mind reeled at hearing, point-blank, that his twin was dead. He'd sought answers, but not like this...
"Oh God, no," he gasped, putting a hand out to support himself against the side of the truck. It was stupid to make a sudden movement when faced with an armed woman whose hands were shaking, but right then Alec didn't care if she shot him.
The roadhouse owner frowned. "Christo," she exclaimed, and studied his reaction while Alec just stared back at her. Then she lowered her weapon slightly, and said, "Well, I'll be damned. Who are you?"
"Alec Hardison," he croaked. "I'm Jake Talley's twin."
"And how on earth did you wind up here?"
He'd had a whole introductory speech prepared, about chatting with Ash online and hoping to find out what happened to him. But in his state of shock, all he could say was, "Ash."
Her expression bleak, Mrs. Harvelle nodded at the charred wreckage of her business and home. "He was found in there - that answer your question?"
"Was it the demon?" Alec asked.
She looked at him sharply. "Yeah, it was." Then, to his relief, she flicked the safety on and put the shotgun back in the truck. "I'm Ellen," she said. "We need to talk. There's a diner five miles down the road; I'll meet you there."
***
It was the middle of a weekday afternoon, and the diner was deserted except for some truckers playing cards in a back booth. Alec and Ellen sat by the dusty front window, under a ceiling fan that creaked as it turned. He sipped soda and toyed with a slice of apple pie, not really hungry, while she topped up her strong black coffee with liquor from a flask.
"Sorry about earlier," Ellen said, "but it's been one hell of a week and I'm more than a little rattled. So how about you tell me what you know about Jake and the demon, and I'll fill in the gaps."
Alec laid it all out for her, as he had done for Louise a few days earlier. Ellen listened intently, asking questions here and there. When he explained about Nana's friend using magic to anchor him, Ellen looked impressed. She inspected his wrists, where the demon's red blisters and Louise's pale finger marks were fading but still visible.
"I wish we'd known about that spell," she sighed. "It sure would've helped Sam and Dean."
In response to Alec's questioning look, Ellen said that Sam Winchester was one of the 1983 kids and Dean was his older brother. Alec nodded, recognizing the name from his forums - the Winchesters were famous among hunters.
Sam had been abducted by the yellow-eyed demon a week ago, she continued, and taken to a ghost town in South Dakota. There, he met four other 23-year-olds with psychic powers...including Jake.
"You sure you want to hear this? It doesn't end well for your brother," Ellen warned him.
Alec took a deep breath. "I know, but I have to understand what happened. Not knowing would be worse," he said firmly.
Ellen only told him the bare bones, but it was bad enough. The demon had tried to turn his five captives against each other. It sounded like Survivor, except that the eliminated contestants died in horrible ways.
Jake had initially been Sam Winchester's ally, but the demon had appeared in a dream and convinced him that there could only be one winner. So Jake had attacked Sam, using his super-strength to his advantage. Drilled in fighting techniques since childhood, Sam had gained the upper hand just as Dean arrived to rescue him.
As Sam was staggering towards Dean, and freedom, Jake stabbed him in the back and then ran off. Sam had died in his brother's arms.
Alec winced at hearing this, shaking his head. He'd known that his twin had killed people before, as a soldier, but this was so much worse.
"Wait," he said suddenly. "If Sam died, how come you know what happened before Dean got there?"
"Because Sam didn't stay dead," she replied.
Alec blinked at Ellen, surprised by her matter-of-fact tone. "What, so he's a zombie now? Or a vampire?"
"No, nothing like that," she reassured him hastily. "Sam's alive, and still human, but you're better off not knowing the details as to how. Just thinking about it makes me sick."
Feeling nauseous already, he let it slide. "OK. So how did you meet Jake?"
Ellen explained that she'd been away from the roadhouse when it was torched by demons - it seemed that Ash's work in tracking a sudden shift in demonic activity had attracted their attention. The guy was too smart for his own good, Alec thought sadly. Then she'd traveled to another hunter's home base and met up with the Winchesters. Together, they'd worked out what the yellow-eyed demon wanted Jake to do.
A trail of omens led them to an abandoned pioneer cemetery in Wyoming, where they found Jake opening a portal to Hell. Ellen's voice shook as she described Jake using his newly-developed telekinesis to force her own gun against her temple.
Shit, Alec thought, no wonder she'd looked so afraid when he'd approached her in the parking lot. What a nightmare.
Sam had shot Jake in the back, repaying the favor, then Dean had killed the yellow-eyed demon. But hundreds of demons were released into the world before the hunters got the portal closed again.
Alec held his head in his hands, staring down at the table, as Ellen finished telling her story. He didn't want to believe that his twin was a bad guy, but the evidence was pretty damning.
He couldn't help wondering what would have happened without Louise's intervention. If the demon had reunited him with Jake in South Dakota, would Alec have resisted the temptation of psychic powers? And if it had come down to just the two of them, would Jake have killed him in order to win? Or could they have joined forces to combat the demon?
Some of what Alec was thinking must have shown in his face, because Ellen reached across the table and touched his arm. He looked up.
"I know that What if? look," she said quietly, her expression sympathetic. "You can drive yourself crazy with hypotheticals after a death. But you can't change what happened, and you can't bring your brother back. Give yourself time to grieve, then try to let him go."
***
Alec exchanged contact details with Ellen, agreeing to let her know if anything else unusual happened to him. Then he set out west, for Wyoming. He didn't normally like wide open spaces; he was a city boy at heart. But driving along the straight interstate was a welcome relief, when his thoughts were so tangled and twisted.
After spending the night in a Cheyenne hotel, Alec followed Ellen's directions to the remote cowboy graveyard the next morning. To his relief, an early summer storm had already washed Jake's blood away. The only visible sign of the traumatic events Ellen had described was a large patch of disturbed soil. Jake and the yellow-eyed demon's vessel were buried here, side by side, in the first grave dug in the old cemetery for many decades.
Alec picked up some fallen branches, and hammered the sturdiest one into the ground with his tire jack. He used rope from the rental car's trunk to lash a shorter piece of wood to the longer one, forming a cross. He didn't know which side of the shared plot Jake was buried in, but it didn't matter...the poor bastard possessed by the demon deserved a memorial too.
He wished he could retrieve his brother's dog tags, to keep for himself or return to Jake's family down in Alabama. But even that small memento was lost to him. Ellen had told him that any personal object belonging to a deceased person could become haunted by their spirit. So the Winchesters had melted down the dog tags and all the other items Jake had on him, burying them with his incinerated remains.
Standing over the grave, Alec bowed his head and wiped away tears. It was awful to think that this was the closest he would ever get to his twin, after 23 years of unknowing separation. But at least he had learnt the truth about what had happened; at least he could say goodbye.
***
After his return to Atlanta, it was a couple more weeks before Alec felt strong enough to reach out to his brother's family. The Army had informed Jake's adoptive mother and sister that he was missing, of course, but Alec was pretty certain that they hadn't been told about the mysterious circumstances. And they sure as hell didn't know that Jake had been shot dead in Wyoming...by the guy he'd killed a few days before that, in South Dakota.
Alec had mixed feelings about contacting Mrs. Talley. He figured that she deserved to know that her boy was dead, so she wouldn't go on hoping in vain. But how could he possibly prove it? In the end, he wrote a short letter saying that he was her son's long-lost identical twin, had heard about Jake's disappearance, and wanted to meet his family.
He hadn't known what reaction to expect. But Jake's mom immediately invited him down to Birmingham, and welcomed him with open arms. Sitting next to her on the living room sofa was a weird experience for Alec; there were pictures of Jake everywhere, ranging from baby photos to a formal portrait in his Army uniform. And he was sure that meeting a stranger with her son's face was pretty surreal for Mrs. Talley too.
Jake's teenaged sister Danielle had burst into tears as soon as she saw Alec, running upstairs and slamming her door. Her mother had apologized, embarrassed, but Alec didn't blame the girl at all. The whole situation was fucked up.
It was hard for Alec to explain how he'd found out about Jake in the first place, without revealing his criminal misuse of federal databases. He just said that he'd been wondering about his birth family, and had discovered evidence that he and his brother had been separated as infants and sent to different foster homes.
Apparently the Talleys were never told that their adopted son had a twin, so Alec was pretty sure that Jake had no idea either. That was strangely comforting; it would have hurt to learn that Jake knew of Alec's existence, but hadn't tried to find him.
Then came the hardest part.
Alec put down his glass of tea and said, as gently as he could, "Mrs. Talley, I don't want to cause you any further pain. But I feel, in my heart, that Jake is gone. I can't explain it...I just know."
He was prepared to lie if she questioned him, claiming some psychic twin link, but he didn't have to.
"I know," Mrs. Talley replied, "I feel it too. Mother's intuition, maybe?" Then her composure broke, and she began to cry. Alec reached out tentatively, to put his hand over hers, but she leaned forward and rested her head against his shoulder.
So he wrapped his arms around Jake's mom, and grieved with her.
***
Alec had confided everything to Willow, of course - if there was anyone who could understand the shit he'd been through recently, it was her. He also passed on Ellen's information to Louise, letting her know what had happened to the other 1983 kids that her Christian network had been monitoring.
But he decided never to tell anyone else about Jake, let alone about the yellow-eyed demon. It was too private, too painful, and who would believe him anyway? He knew he should take Ellen's advice, and put the whole mess behind him.
Still, he did think long and hard about trying to find the Winchester brothers. They were obviously pretty good at covering their tracks, if the FBI had been chasing them for so long, but Alec had faith in his own skills. What good would it do to meet them, though? He would only hear more about his brother's betrayal of Sam, his cruelty to Ellen, and his role in opening the gate to Hell. And even if Sam did kill Jake, Alec owed Dean for killing the demon that had tormented him for months. In some weird sense, they were even.
Anyway, Alec wasn't sure that the Winchesters wouldn't just shoot him on sight, and check his ID later. It was probably best to leave them alone; they had plenty of work to do, hunting down all those demons that Jake had released.
***
Alec returned to Chicago, packing up and moving out of his apartment. He didn't sign another lease right away, though. Instead, he put his belongings into storage and went traveling.
Willow had suggested that he get away from familiar people and places for a while. Moving to England after Tara's death had really helped her come to terms with her loss and reassess her life, she said.
Alec took Willow's advice, and decided to take most of the next year off to see the world. He'd never left the US before, so he forged passports to match several of his squeaky-clean aliases. First he went to WorldCon in Japan, which was an epic multicultural geek-fest (and a huge amount of fun). After that, he traveled through Asia and the Middle East to Europe. He visited incredible places, but also witnessed terrible suffering which helped put his own troubles in some kind of perspective.
While he didn't want to give up crime altogether, Alec felt like he had to do something useful with the proceeds - and maybe atone for Jake's sins in some small way. So he started giving large sums of money away as he traveled. Nana had always supported her church's missionary work, even when she was struggling financially. Since Alec didn't share that devout faith, he decided to support NGOs doing development work in the poorer countries that he passed through.
He had a chance to do some good closer to home as well. In one of her regular emails, Mrs. Talley mentioned that she might lose her house without Jake's Army paycheck to supplement her income. So Alec offered to pay off her mortgage. Mrs. Talley was reluctant to accept charity, but he convinced her that he could afford it and that he wanted to help. He also set up a college fund for Jake's sister Danielle, who was apparently showing real promise in her high school language classes.
When he returned to Chicago in the spring, he moved into a new apartment. Then he eased back into things gradually, taking just a few select jobs that piqued his interest.
It took him a while to settle back into his old life, for the obvious reasons but also for an unexpected one: his extra-special technological capability was gone. It had kicked in when he was 22, around the time his nightmares had started, so it made sense that it had started to fade away after the demon's death.
The downgrade was actually a relief, in a way. It had freaked him out to have demon-bestowed powers. He preferred his usual skill level, which he had built up over time through study and hard work. He didn't mind just being incredibly talented, rather than impossibly brilliant.
Alec was still good enough to crack almost any kind of computer security, and he still enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspect of professional hacking. But he'd lost much of his competitive drive to be the world's best cyber-criminal...that pressing desire for success which had inspired him for so long.
What was the point? He already had more cash than he needed, and could easily get more. Anyway, it had never been about the profit for him, not really. Giving money away helped him feel a little better, but there was still something missing.
***
An unusual contract got Alec's attention late that summer. It was a corporate espionage job, with a twist: a senior guy at one aerospace company claimed that a competitor had stolen his airplane designs, and was hiring a crew to steal them back.
Alec's task would be to break into the competitor's R&D room, copy the data, and destroy the system and all the back-ups. Even with his diminished skills, he could probably do it one-handed after pulling a WoW all-nighter.
So far, so whatever...the intriguing part was his temporary teammates. Alec had heard of the thief who went by the single name Parker - she was a legend among criminals. But he'd never met her, or even seen a picture. It would be interesting to find out if she was as crazy as her reputation suggested.
"Retrieval specialist" (whatever the hell that meant) Eliot Spencer was even more of a mystery. His name was an alias, of course, but it was an impressively solid one; only an expert like Alec could pick those documents as fake. He would bet that Spencer's identity had been created by the military, or some government agency with a three-letter name.
And the really interesting part, which he found out just days before the crew convened, was that Nathan Ford would mastermind the whole operation. The brilliant insurance investigator was still the only authority figure who had ever caught Alec. But his life had imploded since then, and he'd lost his job at IYS. Now he was apparently freelancing in a morally gray kind of way.
Nate Ford, heading a team of thieves? Alec would have taken the contract just to see what happened; hell, he would have done it for free. The $300,000 he'd been offered was the icing on the cake.
Anyway, the job was going down right here in Chicago. If everything went to plan, Alec would be home and in bed long before dawn.
Getting his gear together before the team meet-up, he planned his approach. It'd be pointless to use an alias this time: Ford already knew his real name. Alec would introduce himself to the others as Hardison, though...no need to be on a first-name basis for a one-off job.
Alec slung his bag over one shoulder, switched the lights off, and left his apartment. It was nice out tonight, and he had plenty of time. After choosing a favorite playlist on his iPod, he began to walk to the rendezvous point downtown.
***
Chapter 7