SPN/DA crossover fic: Of Desire and the Status Quo (19/38)
Story Title: Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter Title: Requiem for a Paradise Lost
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Summary: In the end, it’s a complete accident that gets Dean Winchester out of Hell.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,621
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter XIX: Requiem for a Paradise Lost
“No way that fucking just happened,” Shane remarks, glancing behind him through the truck’s rear window into the very unpopulated-by-hospital-security-wanting-to-arrest-slash-kill-them darkness.
Max rolls her eyes from the front passenger seat, used to the X6’s antics. “For the fifth time, it did happen,” she sighs, withholding her own grin. Even she has to admit they were pretty Jedi about it all. Breaking into a hospital and stealing a good chunk of their equipment required skill. “Now shut up and study the damn thing. Rade will need it A.S.A.P.”
“And what is this for again?” Damen-the youngest of the three-pipes up from the backseat. “I mean, who is this guy that we’re bending over backwards for? What’s even his name?”
Max clears her throat, uncomfortable with even the preliminary questions. She doesn’t blame them, given that the majority of T.C. knows nothing about Dean, but it doesn’t mean she’s cool with discussing it. “His name’s Dean Winchester,” she answers quietly. “He’s…a friend.”
“Dean Winchester?” Kalinda asks from next to Damen. “I’ve never heard of him before. What is he, another X5? Transhuman?”
Max’s imagination barrages her with the comical image of a part-salamander Dean, but she quickly squashes it. “No, he’s an Ordinary,” she says, choosing to get the bomb over with.
“What the hell?” Damen snaps indignantly, leaning forward so he’s between Max and Shane’s seats. “An Ordinary? Don’t we got enough of those lemmings hanging around?”
Her hands gripping the steering wheel tighter, Max purses her lips, simultaneously thinking that she should have realized this would be their reaction. Hell, it would’ve been hers, too, had it not been for the whole nightmare-looks-like-Alec-is-possibly-a-serial-killer thing.
“Look, he’s kind of like Logan, I guess,” Max answers, not really believing herself. There’s beginnings of an outcry from the backseat, which prompts her to surge forward. “As in, he’s down with what transgenics are, and he doesn’t care.” More like he doesn’t care about anything, but they don’t need to know that, Max thinks. “He’ll only be here for a while-he got tortured by White and whoever else, and Rade needs this stuff to fix him up. So stop complaining, all of you.”
“Why would White want some random Ordinary?” Shane asks, genuinely curious.
She shrugs, wracking her brain for a lie. “He’s…I don’t know,” she finally settles, going for the psycho card: “Who the hell knows what goes through White’s mind?”
“True that,” Damen finally agrees, relaxing back into his chair as much as he can, watching the few working lights of downtown speed by.
Whatever ill feelings or prejudice Rade may have felt about Dean vanishes as soon as he’s carried into the medical bay. She’s always been an expert at compartmentalizing, and at the moment, she doesn’t see the convoluted, Memento-esque mess that surrounds the man, but rather someone whose body and mind are at their wits’ end and in need of desperate repair. And if Rade’s the only one who can possibly fix them-and, well, she is-then by God, she’s going to do it.
As two X6s she vaguely remembers as Damen and Shane set Dean on the gurney (and none too lightly, which earns them a black glare), she doesn’t skip a beat in hooking up the EEG, EKG, and vitals monitor, gluing the electrodes to Dean’s scalp and skin with precision efficiency. She tells the X’s they should leave-she prefers to, when the person’s not, say, bleeding out, work alone-pulls over a stool and sits, simply observing.
Because regardless of the despising exterior she’d exuded in terms of Dean, she’s actually damn curious. Not, unlike ninety-nine percent of those in the know in T.C., about Dean’s possible Ordinary past as a cold-blooded killer, and not even that he looks like a future Alec. No. What Rade’s more interested in is less surface, and more hardwire. That is, she wants to know what makes Dean so drastically different in behaviors, what caused his abrupt shift in perception and equilibrium.
She knows what it’s not. She’s already idly ran past the normal issues; granted, she’d had to work a little to recall the specifics about the problems associated with Ordinaries as opposed to just Manticore’s, but she’s gone through them nonetheless. It’s not schizophrenia, which was the most likely culprit: sure, Dean’d showed pretty much the dissertation of symptoms for the disease, but there’s the tiny caveat of that, especially in conjunction with what Max had told her, it seemed to be triggered by only two particular things. Hell, they’d said; Hell, and apparently his brother, Sam.
What she’s finally decided on, albeit not quite as definitively as she’d like, is that Dean’s in some kind of dual functioning state. The main one being where he appears normal enough, smartass enough, hard-as-nails enough, acting just like, well, Alec. The other, however, being assaulted with completely unrepressed, raw, white-hot, nerve-splitting memories. Or fears. Either way, Rade knows something happened to this kid-and okay, Dean’s probably a few years older than Rade herself, but the way he looks now ages him down at least a decade-and that something is of what Rade wants to get to the barebones reason. And, Heaven help her, she wants to put him back together again.
So she watches Dean, occasionally glancing to the EEG waves, which as yet haven’t shown anything remarkably anomalous; and she watches his vitals, which as yet haven’t strayed too far out of the normal range; and she watches his shoulder, whose bleeding had been stemmed owing to the sizable amount of gauze and bandages wrapped around it, but she knows it still hasn’t been fully repaired; and she watches Dean’s face, each and every muscle tick and spasm branding itself into her brain. She wants to miss absolutely nothing, and she won’t.
She’s almost to the point of worrying that Dean’s neural activity is a little too steady, when suddenly the brainwaves spike, and Dean’s eyes open, his pupils dilating in the overhead lights. Rade’s immediately up, bracing herself in case Dean decides to espouse his inner assassin again and put her in the hospital. But he doesn’t, to her relief; he just stays in the same position, save for maybe hunching in a little on himself.
Now that he’s awake, though, to Rade’s eyes he looks abnormal with the wires cemented to his head, the leads connected to his bare chest that relay his heartbeats to the multiparameter monitor. So, attempting to pretext as complete neutrality-she’d found that patients were a lot like horses, in that they could be just as skittish, and just as likely to kick you in the teeth, so to speak. She carefully peels off the metal disks, the residual glue slicking Dean’s already sweat-dampened hair, and drops them in a spare tray, before leaning against the side of the cold slab on which Dean lies.
“Dean,” Rade tests out, feeling the need to near-whisper, even though rationally, she knows it’s totally pointless. “Dean, can you hear me?”
Dean flicks his eyes over dead center to Rade’s, and she mentally checks off one of the signs that Dean’s in his conscious mind. “I know you,” he rasps, the sound a perfect archetype of a scoured trachea.
“Yeah, my name is Rade,” she answers calmly, determined not to freak him out. (She doesn’t fail to be aware of the oddity of the situation, considering the circumstances.) “I stitched you up a while ago. Guess I’m here to do it again.”
Attempting to laugh, Dean just ends up coughing, and leans over to wait it out. Spitting a mouthful of blood for which Rade’s entirely too unnerved with his lack of discomfort, Dean regains his previous supine position with a miniscule groan. It all elicits an unhappy grimace from Rade, who, in her experience, has never found it a good sign when someone starts producing blood from where it’s most definitely not supposed to be. But she doesn’t say anything.
She leaves that to Dean. “Really,” Dean says, succeeding in a chuckle this time. “I’m glad that electro-bomb thing didn’t wipe out all the hot ones after all.”
Rade’s mouth twitches, and she wants to believe this is simply Dean devolving into a Florence Nightingale effect thing, but, given to whom he looks remarkably similar…she doubts it. “All right, stud, listen up,” she snaps, gridlocking her determination. “You got some crossed wires up in that pretty little brain of yours that really shouldn’t be crossing, and I need to know why. You went in for some garden-variety shoulder surgery, and next thing you get dragged in here with the only explanation given to me that you started seizing like an epileptic?
“You stabbed a doctor with a hypodermic filled to the nines with anticonvulsants-you could’ve killed him. No one knows enough about your damn self to come up with any reasonable answers, and most of Terminal City’s either scared of you or pissed off. Start giving me answers, Dean fucking Winchester, or I’ll make you give them to me, and take my word for it: you don’t want that to happen.”
“I knocked out some doc with a needle and avoided getting jabbed with one, too?” Dean asks in shock. “Damn, I wish I remembered that.”
Rade shuts her eyes for a minute, collecting herself. “So much for my hope that you’d be more mature than Alec,” she mutters ruefully.
When she opens her eyes again to look at Dean, she sees his face has lost the little bit of humor it’d garnered, the dimples that had been previously only akin to the aforementioned X5 appearing as Dean’s lips purse in discontent. “What’s with all that crap?” Dean asks tiredly. “I’ve been confused with the dude ever since I got dumped here, not to mention he looks like me when I was, like, nineteen. What the ever-loving hell?”
He winces at what only he knows is the irony of his words, but Rade gets the sense it’s not out of pain. “Okay, then,” Rade says, offering the proverbial olive branch. “I’ll make you a deal. I tell you all about Seattle’s own little slice of squalor, you tell me what slasher film is playing in your head.”
Dean starts to clam up, Rade can literally see it, but then his muscles relax the minutest degree, and he nods. “Just-I don’t think you’d believe most of what I’d say,” Dean claims darkly, even though Zero had been up for at least listening. But Zero was a lost kid…Rade doesn’t seem to be.
It’s Rade’s turn to chortle, and she gets up to wet a swatch of towel, handing it to Dean to rub off the hardening gel from the electrodes. “I was made in a glass tube in a genetics lab,” she says matter-of-factly, even though it’s an aspect Dean already knows. “What could you possibly say that’s out of my belief?”
Dean shakes his head, sitting up with a cringe (and this one Rade knows to attribute to pain) and running the rag through his hair. “Lady, let’s just say that The Omen and Hellraiser ain’t too far off. But you first.”
Rade doesn’t know the films that Dean’s referring to-Manticore wasn’t huge on Friday Movie Night, and Rade wasn’t a field agent so she doesn’t have much knowledge on pop culture, especially pre-Pulse-but from the way their titles sound, and the gallows humor in Dean’s voice, Rade’s certain she’s not going to like the upcoming conversation. But she’s not one to be deterred at the sign of difficulty, and so she merely pulls over the stool she’d been sitting on earlier, looks Dean in the eye, and shrugs. It’s her turn.
“What do you know about spliced and recombinant DNA?”
When Logan finally returns to Sandeman’s house-there was some sector checkpoint ordeal that caused a backup a block long-he gets out of his car, only to see a faint blue glow from between the blinds, and is immediately on edge, which, given the annoyance he’d just come from, didn’t take much. Withdrawing the nine-millimeter that he’d learned to carry from the glove compartment, he sidles up the stairs, really wishing this night would just end already. In a beat, Logan slams open the door, and points the handgun to his computer terminals, which would be the only source of the light.
It takes him a second or two, but in the almost nonexistent luminance, he recognizes the face and lowers the gun. “Max?” he asks incredulously, flipping on the overhead bulb. “What are you doing here?”
Max looks up at him, thoroughly unperturbed with Logan’s entrance and weapon. Though, judging from the bags under her eyes and the solemn expression, it could just be fatigue. “I’m trying to look for some more stuff that could help on Dean.”
“In the dark?”
“Logan, I got cat vision. Might as well be daytime for me.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Logan gripes petulantly, walking over to look at the screens. “So did you find anything?”
Max sighs deeply, and hands Logan a few meager pieces of paper. “Maybe,” she answers despondently. “But I can’t be sure. Mainly it’s just…weird.”
Logan snorts, glancing up from the papers to look at Max. “You’re just now realizing that?” he questions in disbelief. “How is this whole thing not a million kinds of crazy?”
“No. I mean, yeah, I know it is,” Max fumbles, “but it’s just-there’s no records about him. Not anything past the cops’ ones, anyway. It’s like he doesn’t exist.” She points to the topmost paper in Logan’s hand and elaborates, “That’s his birth certificate, dated ’79 from Kansas, to Mary and John Winchester. It’s the only info I could find on Dean; there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, after that.”
“But?” Logan asks, predicting more.
“I found some on Sam,” Max reports, rearranging the papers in Logan’s hands. “Apparently he went to Stanford University, down in California, and they kept their hardcopies of student files. He was pre-law, it looks like, but then in September of 2005, he disappears from the records, too. The only other mention I found, and this is the weird part, is of a massive fire in his apartment around the same time he disappeared. There was a fatality, his girlfriend, Jessica Moore.”
Logan glances up at her, intrigued. And also a little impressed that Max was able to dredge up something. “The weirdest bit is the source of the fire, and the condition of the burnout; I hacked into the Palo Alto Fire Department files, and found the full report. They obviously were making the evidence fit into an electrical shortage or whatever, but from what I could figure out, it looked like the fire started on the ceiling, which was also where parts of Jessica’s remains were located.”
Logan’s brow creases as he scans through the scraps of evidence Max had discovered. She was right about the fire thing, he can see that from some crime scene photos. “Okay, you’re right. That doesn’t make any sense,” Logan agrees. “Any idea what could cause this kind of thing?”
“Not one,” Max answers. “And I think it’s even stranger that Sam would just vanish after his longtime girlfriend died in their apartment inferno. I mean, what’s up with that?”
“I don’t know,” Logan says, feeling like it’s his mantra as of late. No pain, no gain, he supposes miserably. Hoping the condition in which he’d last seen Dean wasn’t as bad as he’d thought, he continues, “All right…so, has Rade given you a time when she’ll be done with Dean?”
Max shakes her head. “She’s still got him under lockdown,” she relays. “The way she looked, though, I think it’ll be a while. And even if Rade were done, do you really think Dean would let us talk to him? He’s been more tight-lipped than anyone I’ve ever seen.” Suddenly, she rounds on Logan, who internally winces in anticipation. “Isn’t there some sort of psychological thing where all this repression or refusal to share comes out anyway?”
Logan laughs humorlessly. “Normally, I think so,” he replies, though honestly, he’s not anything close to a psychologist, so hell if he knows. “But seriously, Max. Has there been one shred of proof that Dean’s a normal human being? The guy’s got nothing to lose, which makes it pretty hard to be one up on him.” He waits a beat, before throwing it out there, “Maybe there’s something we can find that’ll entice him to tell us something? At the very least, about the fire?”
“Like what?” Max retorts. “The only thing we could find that might make a difference would be his brother. And we’re no closer to that now than we were days ago. Might ‘s well face it. We’re not going to locate Sam, and we’re not going to get anything else out of Dean.”
“Well, you’ve got to hand it to them, I guess,” Logan remarks with a certain amount of unfortunate praise. “I mean, what, over twenty-five years of hiding and they’ve pretty much got no personal info? That’s pretty impressive.”
“Why don’t you just write them a fan letter,” Max wits. Then she pauses, with a thought that Logan can see even she’s not certain on. “What if we can figure out where Dean’s been? By all accounts, he should be with Sam, right? Or at least look like he’s his real age according to the police files? There’s something strange here, at best. Maybe if we can tell him we know what happened, that we understand, he’ll tell us something.”
Logan winces, not wanting to poke holes in Max’s argument. “Sounds great. But what exactly do we understand?”
Perturbed, Max elaborates, “Fine, cynic. Dean’s given us some clues, hasn’t he? And with the articles about the fire…”
“Max!” Logan snaps, needing her to acknowledge the preposterousness of her ideas. “All Dean’s been moaning about is, what, Hell? Not wanting Sam to be taken? He’s twitchier than a recovering alcoholic in a bar! All of what he’s said is just crazy psychobabble, it means nothing. Perhaps to him it does, but it’s just nonsense.”
But Max wouldn’t be Max if she didn’t stick to her guns, and true to form, she folds her arms across her chest, standing up defensively. “What if it isn’t nonsense?” she says solidly, tilting her chin up. “How do we know it’s not legit?”
Logan can’t do anything but stare, agape at what Max is saying. He hadn’t thought neurological diseases were contagious, but… “Hell, Max? Dean wasn’t muttering about figurative Hell, like most of us do. He was thinking it’s an actual place! That he went to? How in any sense is that not nine kinds of insane?”
Upset and incensed now, Max snatches the papers from Logan’s hands, not caring if she gave him a paper cut. “You know as well as I do that there are things possible that people haven’t thought were. I’m living proof of that. Just because Dean’s saying things that don’t necessarily appeal to our reasoning doesn’t mean they’re not true. If it’s a lead that could even possibly go somewhere, we’ve got to take it.”
“Max…”
“Fine!” she exclaims, shrugging on her leather jacket and fastening her gloves around her hands. “I’ll just bring these to Dix. Maybe he can find something. I’ll talk to you later, Logan.”
She’s out the door before Logan’s brain can fathom the rationale behind Max’s words, and he stares at the air she’d vacated with just as much incredulity. He’s always admired Max’s stick-to-it-ness, but now, he’s thinking her latest venture might be done more out of spite than anything else. How can she seriously believe that Dean’s been spouting truths? Hell? It’s such an abstract idea. Logan’s pretty sure even priests, who believe in that kind of stuff, don’t actually put stock in the location so much as a threat to those who commit sins and the like. And here Max is taking Dean’s word on faith. To a guy she hardly knows, and whose actions have only made his case worse for him.
Logan would go to the end of the world and back for Max, but with this, she’s reached the line and quickstepped over it jauntily. Just because he cares almost too much for Max doesn’t mean that he owes Dean jack squat. If Max wants to go on a goose chase for a fictional destination straight out of Dante, he’ll leave her to it. Him, he’s going to…well, he’s not quite sure yet, but it certainly isn’t going to include Hell or Dean Winchester.
“So let me get this straight,” Dean says slowly, running a roughened hand over his face. Staring at Rade, who had just finished her explanation of Manticore and Terminal City, he clarifies, “You guys were manufactured, forced against your will to become soldiers who kill or else are killed, were experimented upon, escaped, and started your own crappy city thing? You’re right-that’s pretty hard to believe.”
Rade sighs, and kind of wants to smack Dean around a little, but given his current state as well as hers as a respectable medic, she merely remains sitting with her legs crisscrossed opposite Dean on the metal table. “It’s all just science, Dean,” she responds, telling herself she’s not defending Manticore. “I mean, state-of-the-art science, but it’s not extraterrestrial.” At Dean’s still dubious look-it’s all too, despite what Rade had said, X-Files for him-Rade retorts, “Fine. What do you got, then?”
She almost expects Dean to just renege on his deal, to determine he’s not up for explaining after all; and, considering all that she’s seen and heard of him, she wouldn’t be surprised. But Dean also hasn’t struck her as the kind of guy to back down in the face of hardship, even if it’s extremely painful. And, to her relief and curiosity, Dean begins.
“I’m a hunter,” he starts. “I mean, I guess I was a hunter.” Rade suspends her questioning on that last fact; Dean sure as hell doesn’t look like the undead to her. And he also doesn’t seem like the guy to wait patiently just to shoot a deer.
“A hunter of what, exactly?” Rade asks.
Dean stalls, the cautious part of his mind wondering why in the world he’s about to tell some…thing…about his past. He doesn’t even know her, not really, and she’s actually pretty damn abrasive. Sure, she’s not for the coddling like Max or Cindy seemed to be, but still. That doesn’t mean he owes her something. Especially not what’s happened to him; he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to tell anyone about that. Rade can preach her sob story all she wants to him, but Dean knows it’s freakin’ translucent in comparison to his. And yet, if he can tell her the other parts of his still unsavory past, maybe it’ll get him an ally in this whole mess.
“Demons,” Dean answers after a while, the words feeling like sick acid on his tongue as flashbacks flare rapid fire through his mind. “Demons, ghosts, tulpas, shapeshifters, a whole host of other supernatural bottom feeders.”
Rade stares blankly at him, seriously pondering if she should have reconsidered the possibility of Dean having a few screws loose. She’s willing to accept a lot, but this is out of her job description. “Look, if you’re going to lie, at least make it convincing,” Rade snaps, about two seconds away from getting off the table, finding the bottle of lorazepam and doping Dean up again.
“I’m not lying!” Dean protests violently, his eyes blazing the same sentiments. “Jesus, even you-what did you call yourselves?-transgenics don’t think I’m telling the truth. Well, you’re wrong. All of you are.”
Whether Rade trusts him or not (and, to be honest, she’s leaning towards not), she’s going to humor him. If nothing else than to, well, sate her curiosity. It’s not every day you meet someone who proclaims he fought demons. Then she remembers something. “Wait, is that what you were talking about when you accused Alec of being a shapeshifter?” she asks. “With the silver knife thing?”
Dean nods his head despondently. “Yeah, it was,” he answers. “I was hoping that he was one, actually. Which says a lot, considering I hate the damn things more than almost all the lower-level bastards out there. One screwed up my life, got me tracked for multiple murders-it’s not like I wanted to let that happen again. But I guess he’s not a shapeshifter, whatever that means.”
“So you’re saying that the crimes you committed-Max told me-weren’t your fault? It was all some…er…shapeshifter?” The word sounds alien in her mouth, but she’s fighting through it.
“Well, not all of them,” Dean answers awkwardly. “But most of the killing was necessary. You know, salting and burning, changelings, that kind of thing.”
“I don’t know,” Rade dissents, disliking the phrase. “This is all too whacked.”
Dean shrugs, then instantly regrets it, putting a hand to his shoulder. “I’ve heard that one before,” he grinds out against the pain. Rade gets up and walks over to the group of medicine bottles, grabbing the morphine and beginning to draw some out. “Knock it off,” Dean snaps, halting her. “I’m not an invalid. I’ve had a hell of a lot more pain than this. And besides, morphine slows me down.”
“You think you’re going to be fighting something?” Rade replies caustically, unable to imagine Dean coming to blows with his shoulder, even if it is back in its socket. “Not on my watch, Winchester.”
Dean smirks and starts to say something, which Rade’s just about positive wouldn’t be acceptable for younger audiences, when the doors to the medical wing are burst open. “Hey!” Rade snaps, turning her attention there. “What happened to ‘you disturb me I put you in an Ordinary hospital myself’?”
“Rade,” says Dalton, his face no longer looking impish, but rather distressed. He spares a glance to Dean, and although his eyes nearly bug out of his head-it’s obvious he can tell it’s not Alec, but is Alec at the same time; Dean, of course, merely stares-he doesn’t have time to dwell before he reveals a transhuman behind him, struggling to hold up a very familiar monocled brethren.
“What’s going on?” Rade demands, feeling her face flush white as she sees Dix’s bloodied and scraped skin, and obviously broken legs. “What the fuck just happened, Dalton? Answer me!”
“We don’t know!” Dalton cries, his words echoing only truth. “I mean, one minute everything’s fine, he’s just typing away, and the next there’s this explosion and Dix is like this!”
Rade’s mind is full of equally imperishable questions, one of them being how she didn’t hear a freakin’ explosion. She voices just that. Dalton simply looks at her, and she gets it. “The doors, they’re soundproof,” Rade speaks, knowing the heavy steel doors, left over from the biotech lab before, blocked out most sounds. Rade most often kept them open except in times of desperation-in this case, Dean-which would explain her lack of noticing something blowing up. Someone, rather.
Dean hops off the table, holding his injured arm to his side, and walks over to the healthy transhuman, who obviously wasn’t built for strength. Rade assumes the others are taking care of the explosion aftermath, the smoke from which she can smell just from the brief period the doors were open.
“Take five, pal,” Dean commands, his rough voice still intimidating. Bending down, he clenches his jaw and grits his teeth, before putting one arm under Dix’s legs, and the other underneath his head.
He starts to lift Dix, Rade temporarily paralyzed, and he gets him off of the ground, before his mask of indifference falls with the sheer pain of an unrepaired torn rotator cuff and barely-reset shoulder takes the best of him. His bad arm shakes, fresh blood welling and waterfalling from his wound, but right as he starts to drop Dix not of his own accord, Dalton blurs over and takes up the slack, regarding Dean with an entirely different light.
They manage to set Dix down on the gurney Dean had previously occupied, the latter falling against the wall and then sliding down, injury leaching all the strength and color out of him. Rade, out of her haze, comes to and registered what had occurred. “Winchester!” she yells, staring down at Dean like an avenging angel. “What the hell are you doing? You probably just fucked up that damn shoulder all over again!”
“Rade,” Dalton intervenes, gesturing helplessly to Dix’s body. “Please.”
Still seething, but knowing her priorities, and knowing whose damage is worse, she shoos Dean and Dalton out of the immediate vicinity, then turns around and starts taking stock of Dix, wishing she didn’t know on whom she’d be operating. For Dean’s part, he presses against the wall like it can take away the hurt, his eyes shut tight against the un-morphined shoulder and regretting that shot of analgesic he’d refused. Not that, again, he’d not had worse, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like a bitch on the warpath.
“Dude,” Dalton says after a few moments, coming to sit against the wall by Dean. He’s still floored by the whole thing, unable to believe Dean’s, you know, real, but for the immediacy, he’s seeing past that. “You’re badass.”
Through his white veil of agony, Dean manages a breathy chuckle. “And you’re a wimp, kid,” he retorts, without knowing even to whom he’s talking.
Dalton takes offense that he knows is irrational, his manly pride taking a fighting stance. “Right back at you. Crying over a rotator cuff.”
That gets Dean’s attention, and in an instant, his eyes are open, green eyes fixed on Dalton’s brown. “Oh, don’t even start with me, half-pint,” Dean retorts, glancing down at his arm, the top of which is completely coated in red, and running in rivulets down his forearm. “Fan-fucking-tastic,” he mutters.
Dalton peers at Dean suspiciously. “No, seriously,” he counters slowly. “That really shouldn’t be a bad injury. You should be fine, blood congealing…what generation are you? Can’t be X5…”
“Generation of bad hair and the gods of Metallica,” Dean smiles in response.
Dalton, of course, misses the allusion entirely. “Gods of lustered alloys?” he asks, completely lost.
Raising an eyebrow, Dean seems to remember that none of the people, extremely unfortunately, even know who Metallica is, let alone the other rock cornerstones the likes of AC/DC, Nirvana, Black Sabbath, and all the rest. “Rock, man,” Dean corrects. “Classic rock bands. You guys are seriously in the dark about good music.”
Finally, Dalton’s over-intelligent brain allows a possibility to come forth. “Wait a second…” he starts, giving Dean’s fit, but internally broken, body a once-over. “Are you an Ordinary?”
“Hey, in no freakin’ reality am I ordinary,” Dean gripes sulkily. “But to you freaks of nature, I guess that’s what you call normal humans.”
Dalton forgives Dean’s retort, in favor of reeling over this new information. “So…what relation are you to Alec, then? I mean, you-”
“-look just like him, yeah, I got the picture,” Dean finishes in a respectable amount of resentment. “I don’t know. I bet you guys are all over that. Or at least that chick and her white supremacist are.”
Unable to hold back a snort of full laughter-despite the dire situation that’s going on right inside the doors to their left-and Dean looks a little taken aback at Dalton’s favorable reaction. “You’re like…the first Ordinary ever to have that view of the guy.”
This is news to Dean, who, the moment he’d seen Logan, really didn’t like him. Something about the aura of preeminence that imbued the guy’s entire being just grated on Dean’s core values. If he hated Sam’s college persona, there was no chance he’d like Logan’s twenty-four/seven persona of the same brand.
“If you don’t mind, kid-”
“Dalton.”
“Whatever. If you don’t mind, I’d like to suffer in peace,” Dean declares, kind of wanting that towel back to sop up all the excess blood pooling on his skin. “It’s easier to hum ‘Kashmir’ without pipsqueak chatter.”
If Dalton’s irked by Dean’s snubbing, he doesn’t show it. Most likely owing to the occasional rapid-fire mood changes that Alec had. He’s also positive that Dean’s not referring to the area between India and Pakistan when he says “Kashmir,” and he assumes it’s some song or something, but he’s not going to check that with Dean. He can see when a soldier’s trying to deal with pain, and Dean reminds Dalton of a soldier (or at least as much as any of the rest of them do), so Dalton understands. He’s had, after all, his own fair share of wounds.
That doesn’t mean, though, that he can’t offer a little assistance. Taking off his overshirt, he hands it to Dean. Dean opens his eyes and regards Dalton for a second before accepting the sacrifice, and puts it on his shoulder, the cloth absorbing the red, viscous fluid. Dean doesn’t say anything to Dalton, but Dalton’s seen the look of relative gratitude in Alec’s eyes more than once to know that Dean is grateful.
Granted, he’s still confused as hell as to who Dean is, and what his connection to Alec happens to be, but there’s more important things at stake. He just hopes that Dix isn’t out of commission indefinitely. Now that the event has actually sunk in, and Dalton knows what’s going on behind closed doors as well as in the command center, his stomach gives a roll of dread.
Next
Chapter Title: Requiem for a Paradise Lost
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Summary: In the end, it’s a complete accident that gets Dean Winchester out of Hell.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,621
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter XIX: Requiem for a Paradise Lost
“No way that fucking just happened,” Shane remarks, glancing behind him through the truck’s rear window into the very unpopulated-by-hospital-security-wanting-to-arrest-slash-kill-them darkness.
Max rolls her eyes from the front passenger seat, used to the X6’s antics. “For the fifth time, it did happen,” she sighs, withholding her own grin. Even she has to admit they were pretty Jedi about it all. Breaking into a hospital and stealing a good chunk of their equipment required skill. “Now shut up and study the damn thing. Rade will need it A.S.A.P.”
“And what is this for again?” Damen-the youngest of the three-pipes up from the backseat. “I mean, who is this guy that we’re bending over backwards for? What’s even his name?”
Max clears her throat, uncomfortable with even the preliminary questions. She doesn’t blame them, given that the majority of T.C. knows nothing about Dean, but it doesn’t mean she’s cool with discussing it. “His name’s Dean Winchester,” she answers quietly. “He’s…a friend.”
“Dean Winchester?” Kalinda asks from next to Damen. “I’ve never heard of him before. What is he, another X5? Transhuman?”
Max’s imagination barrages her with the comical image of a part-salamander Dean, but she quickly squashes it. “No, he’s an Ordinary,” she says, choosing to get the bomb over with.
“What the hell?” Damen snaps indignantly, leaning forward so he’s between Max and Shane’s seats. “An Ordinary? Don’t we got enough of those lemmings hanging around?”
Her hands gripping the steering wheel tighter, Max purses her lips, simultaneously thinking that she should have realized this would be their reaction. Hell, it would’ve been hers, too, had it not been for the whole nightmare-looks-like-Alec-is-possibly-a-serial-killer thing.
“Look, he’s kind of like Logan, I guess,” Max answers, not really believing herself. There’s beginnings of an outcry from the backseat, which prompts her to surge forward. “As in, he’s down with what transgenics are, and he doesn’t care.” More like he doesn’t care about anything, but they don’t need to know that, Max thinks. “He’ll only be here for a while-he got tortured by White and whoever else, and Rade needs this stuff to fix him up. So stop complaining, all of you.”
“Why would White want some random Ordinary?” Shane asks, genuinely curious.
She shrugs, wracking her brain for a lie. “He’s…I don’t know,” she finally settles, going for the psycho card: “Who the hell knows what goes through White’s mind?”
“True that,” Damen finally agrees, relaxing back into his chair as much as he can, watching the few working lights of downtown speed by.
Whatever ill feelings or prejudice Rade may have felt about Dean vanishes as soon as he’s carried into the medical bay. She’s always been an expert at compartmentalizing, and at the moment, she doesn’t see the convoluted, Memento-esque mess that surrounds the man, but rather someone whose body and mind are at their wits’ end and in need of desperate repair. And if Rade’s the only one who can possibly fix them-and, well, she is-then by God, she’s going to do it.
As two X6s she vaguely remembers as Damen and Shane set Dean on the gurney (and none too lightly, which earns them a black glare), she doesn’t skip a beat in hooking up the EEG, EKG, and vitals monitor, gluing the electrodes to Dean’s scalp and skin with precision efficiency. She tells the X’s they should leave-she prefers to, when the person’s not, say, bleeding out, work alone-pulls over a stool and sits, simply observing.
Because regardless of the despising exterior she’d exuded in terms of Dean, she’s actually damn curious. Not, unlike ninety-nine percent of those in the know in T.C., about Dean’s possible Ordinary past as a cold-blooded killer, and not even that he looks like a future Alec. No. What Rade’s more interested in is less surface, and more hardwire. That is, she wants to know what makes Dean so drastically different in behaviors, what caused his abrupt shift in perception and equilibrium.
She knows what it’s not. She’s already idly ran past the normal issues; granted, she’d had to work a little to recall the specifics about the problems associated with Ordinaries as opposed to just Manticore’s, but she’s gone through them nonetheless. It’s not schizophrenia, which was the most likely culprit: sure, Dean’d showed pretty much the dissertation of symptoms for the disease, but there’s the tiny caveat of that, especially in conjunction with what Max had told her, it seemed to be triggered by only two particular things. Hell, they’d said; Hell, and apparently his brother, Sam.
What she’s finally decided on, albeit not quite as definitively as she’d like, is that Dean’s in some kind of dual functioning state. The main one being where he appears normal enough, smartass enough, hard-as-nails enough, acting just like, well, Alec. The other, however, being assaulted with completely unrepressed, raw, white-hot, nerve-splitting memories. Or fears. Either way, Rade knows something happened to this kid-and okay, Dean’s probably a few years older than Rade herself, but the way he looks now ages him down at least a decade-and that something is of what Rade wants to get to the barebones reason. And, Heaven help her, she wants to put him back together again.
So she watches Dean, occasionally glancing to the EEG waves, which as yet haven’t shown anything remarkably anomalous; and she watches his vitals, which as yet haven’t strayed too far out of the normal range; and she watches his shoulder, whose bleeding had been stemmed owing to the sizable amount of gauze and bandages wrapped around it, but she knows it still hasn’t been fully repaired; and she watches Dean’s face, each and every muscle tick and spasm branding itself into her brain. She wants to miss absolutely nothing, and she won’t.
She’s almost to the point of worrying that Dean’s neural activity is a little too steady, when suddenly the brainwaves spike, and Dean’s eyes open, his pupils dilating in the overhead lights. Rade’s immediately up, bracing herself in case Dean decides to espouse his inner assassin again and put her in the hospital. But he doesn’t, to her relief; he just stays in the same position, save for maybe hunching in a little on himself.
Now that he’s awake, though, to Rade’s eyes he looks abnormal with the wires cemented to his head, the leads connected to his bare chest that relay his heartbeats to the multiparameter monitor. So, attempting to pretext as complete neutrality-she’d found that patients were a lot like horses, in that they could be just as skittish, and just as likely to kick you in the teeth, so to speak. She carefully peels off the metal disks, the residual glue slicking Dean’s already sweat-dampened hair, and drops them in a spare tray, before leaning against the side of the cold slab on which Dean lies.
“Dean,” Rade tests out, feeling the need to near-whisper, even though rationally, she knows it’s totally pointless. “Dean, can you hear me?”
Dean flicks his eyes over dead center to Rade’s, and she mentally checks off one of the signs that Dean’s in his conscious mind. “I know you,” he rasps, the sound a perfect archetype of a scoured trachea.
“Yeah, my name is Rade,” she answers calmly, determined not to freak him out. (She doesn’t fail to be aware of the oddity of the situation, considering the circumstances.) “I stitched you up a while ago. Guess I’m here to do it again.”
Attempting to laugh, Dean just ends up coughing, and leans over to wait it out. Spitting a mouthful of blood for which Rade’s entirely too unnerved with his lack of discomfort, Dean regains his previous supine position with a miniscule groan. It all elicits an unhappy grimace from Rade, who, in her experience, has never found it a good sign when someone starts producing blood from where it’s most definitely not supposed to be. But she doesn’t say anything.
She leaves that to Dean. “Really,” Dean says, succeeding in a chuckle this time. “I’m glad that electro-bomb thing didn’t wipe out all the hot ones after all.”
Rade’s mouth twitches, and she wants to believe this is simply Dean devolving into a Florence Nightingale effect thing, but, given to whom he looks remarkably similar…she doubts it. “All right, stud, listen up,” she snaps, gridlocking her determination. “You got some crossed wires up in that pretty little brain of yours that really shouldn’t be crossing, and I need to know why. You went in for some garden-variety shoulder surgery, and next thing you get dragged in here with the only explanation given to me that you started seizing like an epileptic?
“You stabbed a doctor with a hypodermic filled to the nines with anticonvulsants-you could’ve killed him. No one knows enough about your damn self to come up with any reasonable answers, and most of Terminal City’s either scared of you or pissed off. Start giving me answers, Dean fucking Winchester, or I’ll make you give them to me, and take my word for it: you don’t want that to happen.”
“I knocked out some doc with a needle and avoided getting jabbed with one, too?” Dean asks in shock. “Damn, I wish I remembered that.”
Rade shuts her eyes for a minute, collecting herself. “So much for my hope that you’d be more mature than Alec,” she mutters ruefully.
When she opens her eyes again to look at Dean, she sees his face has lost the little bit of humor it’d garnered, the dimples that had been previously only akin to the aforementioned X5 appearing as Dean’s lips purse in discontent. “What’s with all that crap?” Dean asks tiredly. “I’ve been confused with the dude ever since I got dumped here, not to mention he looks like me when I was, like, nineteen. What the ever-loving hell?”
He winces at what only he knows is the irony of his words, but Rade gets the sense it’s not out of pain. “Okay, then,” Rade says, offering the proverbial olive branch. “I’ll make you a deal. I tell you all about Seattle’s own little slice of squalor, you tell me what slasher film is playing in your head.”
Dean starts to clam up, Rade can literally see it, but then his muscles relax the minutest degree, and he nods. “Just-I don’t think you’d believe most of what I’d say,” Dean claims darkly, even though Zero had been up for at least listening. But Zero was a lost kid…Rade doesn’t seem to be.
It’s Rade’s turn to chortle, and she gets up to wet a swatch of towel, handing it to Dean to rub off the hardening gel from the electrodes. “I was made in a glass tube in a genetics lab,” she says matter-of-factly, even though it’s an aspect Dean already knows. “What could you possibly say that’s out of my belief?”
Dean shakes his head, sitting up with a cringe (and this one Rade knows to attribute to pain) and running the rag through his hair. “Lady, let’s just say that The Omen and Hellraiser ain’t too far off. But you first.”
Rade doesn’t know the films that Dean’s referring to-Manticore wasn’t huge on Friday Movie Night, and Rade wasn’t a field agent so she doesn’t have much knowledge on pop culture, especially pre-Pulse-but from the way their titles sound, and the gallows humor in Dean’s voice, Rade’s certain she’s not going to like the upcoming conversation. But she’s not one to be deterred at the sign of difficulty, and so she merely pulls over the stool she’d been sitting on earlier, looks Dean in the eye, and shrugs. It’s her turn.
“What do you know about spliced and recombinant DNA?”
When Logan finally returns to Sandeman’s house-there was some sector checkpoint ordeal that caused a backup a block long-he gets out of his car, only to see a faint blue glow from between the blinds, and is immediately on edge, which, given the annoyance he’d just come from, didn’t take much. Withdrawing the nine-millimeter that he’d learned to carry from the glove compartment, he sidles up the stairs, really wishing this night would just end already. In a beat, Logan slams open the door, and points the handgun to his computer terminals, which would be the only source of the light.
It takes him a second or two, but in the almost nonexistent luminance, he recognizes the face and lowers the gun. “Max?” he asks incredulously, flipping on the overhead bulb. “What are you doing here?”
Max looks up at him, thoroughly unperturbed with Logan’s entrance and weapon. Though, judging from the bags under her eyes and the solemn expression, it could just be fatigue. “I’m trying to look for some more stuff that could help on Dean.”
“In the dark?”
“Logan, I got cat vision. Might as well be daytime for me.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Logan gripes petulantly, walking over to look at the screens. “So did you find anything?”
Max sighs deeply, and hands Logan a few meager pieces of paper. “Maybe,” she answers despondently. “But I can’t be sure. Mainly it’s just…weird.”
Logan snorts, glancing up from the papers to look at Max. “You’re just now realizing that?” he questions in disbelief. “How is this whole thing not a million kinds of crazy?”
“No. I mean, yeah, I know it is,” Max fumbles, “but it’s just-there’s no records about him. Not anything past the cops’ ones, anyway. It’s like he doesn’t exist.” She points to the topmost paper in Logan’s hand and elaborates, “That’s his birth certificate, dated ’79 from Kansas, to Mary and John Winchester. It’s the only info I could find on Dean; there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, after that.”
“But?” Logan asks, predicting more.
“I found some on Sam,” Max reports, rearranging the papers in Logan’s hands. “Apparently he went to Stanford University, down in California, and they kept their hardcopies of student files. He was pre-law, it looks like, but then in September of 2005, he disappears from the records, too. The only other mention I found, and this is the weird part, is of a massive fire in his apartment around the same time he disappeared. There was a fatality, his girlfriend, Jessica Moore.”
Logan glances up at her, intrigued. And also a little impressed that Max was able to dredge up something. “The weirdest bit is the source of the fire, and the condition of the burnout; I hacked into the Palo Alto Fire Department files, and found the full report. They obviously were making the evidence fit into an electrical shortage or whatever, but from what I could figure out, it looked like the fire started on the ceiling, which was also where parts of Jessica’s remains were located.”
Logan’s brow creases as he scans through the scraps of evidence Max had discovered. She was right about the fire thing, he can see that from some crime scene photos. “Okay, you’re right. That doesn’t make any sense,” Logan agrees. “Any idea what could cause this kind of thing?”
“Not one,” Max answers. “And I think it’s even stranger that Sam would just vanish after his longtime girlfriend died in their apartment inferno. I mean, what’s up with that?”
“I don’t know,” Logan says, feeling like it’s his mantra as of late. No pain, no gain, he supposes miserably. Hoping the condition in which he’d last seen Dean wasn’t as bad as he’d thought, he continues, “All right…so, has Rade given you a time when she’ll be done with Dean?”
Max shakes her head. “She’s still got him under lockdown,” she relays. “The way she looked, though, I think it’ll be a while. And even if Rade were done, do you really think Dean would let us talk to him? He’s been more tight-lipped than anyone I’ve ever seen.” Suddenly, she rounds on Logan, who internally winces in anticipation. “Isn’t there some sort of psychological thing where all this repression or refusal to share comes out anyway?”
Logan laughs humorlessly. “Normally, I think so,” he replies, though honestly, he’s not anything close to a psychologist, so hell if he knows. “But seriously, Max. Has there been one shred of proof that Dean’s a normal human being? The guy’s got nothing to lose, which makes it pretty hard to be one up on him.” He waits a beat, before throwing it out there, “Maybe there’s something we can find that’ll entice him to tell us something? At the very least, about the fire?”
“Like what?” Max retorts. “The only thing we could find that might make a difference would be his brother. And we’re no closer to that now than we were days ago. Might ‘s well face it. We’re not going to locate Sam, and we’re not going to get anything else out of Dean.”
“Well, you’ve got to hand it to them, I guess,” Logan remarks with a certain amount of unfortunate praise. “I mean, what, over twenty-five years of hiding and they’ve pretty much got no personal info? That’s pretty impressive.”
“Why don’t you just write them a fan letter,” Max wits. Then she pauses, with a thought that Logan can see even she’s not certain on. “What if we can figure out where Dean’s been? By all accounts, he should be with Sam, right? Or at least look like he’s his real age according to the police files? There’s something strange here, at best. Maybe if we can tell him we know what happened, that we understand, he’ll tell us something.”
Logan winces, not wanting to poke holes in Max’s argument. “Sounds great. But what exactly do we understand?”
Perturbed, Max elaborates, “Fine, cynic. Dean’s given us some clues, hasn’t he? And with the articles about the fire…”
“Max!” Logan snaps, needing her to acknowledge the preposterousness of her ideas. “All Dean’s been moaning about is, what, Hell? Not wanting Sam to be taken? He’s twitchier than a recovering alcoholic in a bar! All of what he’s said is just crazy psychobabble, it means nothing. Perhaps to him it does, but it’s just nonsense.”
But Max wouldn’t be Max if she didn’t stick to her guns, and true to form, she folds her arms across her chest, standing up defensively. “What if it isn’t nonsense?” she says solidly, tilting her chin up. “How do we know it’s not legit?”
Logan can’t do anything but stare, agape at what Max is saying. He hadn’t thought neurological diseases were contagious, but… “Hell, Max? Dean wasn’t muttering about figurative Hell, like most of us do. He was thinking it’s an actual place! That he went to? How in any sense is that not nine kinds of insane?”
Upset and incensed now, Max snatches the papers from Logan’s hands, not caring if she gave him a paper cut. “You know as well as I do that there are things possible that people haven’t thought were. I’m living proof of that. Just because Dean’s saying things that don’t necessarily appeal to our reasoning doesn’t mean they’re not true. If it’s a lead that could even possibly go somewhere, we’ve got to take it.”
“Max…”
“Fine!” she exclaims, shrugging on her leather jacket and fastening her gloves around her hands. “I’ll just bring these to Dix. Maybe he can find something. I’ll talk to you later, Logan.”
She’s out the door before Logan’s brain can fathom the rationale behind Max’s words, and he stares at the air she’d vacated with just as much incredulity. He’s always admired Max’s stick-to-it-ness, but now, he’s thinking her latest venture might be done more out of spite than anything else. How can she seriously believe that Dean’s been spouting truths? Hell? It’s such an abstract idea. Logan’s pretty sure even priests, who believe in that kind of stuff, don’t actually put stock in the location so much as a threat to those who commit sins and the like. And here Max is taking Dean’s word on faith. To a guy she hardly knows, and whose actions have only made his case worse for him.
Logan would go to the end of the world and back for Max, but with this, she’s reached the line and quickstepped over it jauntily. Just because he cares almost too much for Max doesn’t mean that he owes Dean jack squat. If Max wants to go on a goose chase for a fictional destination straight out of Dante, he’ll leave her to it. Him, he’s going to…well, he’s not quite sure yet, but it certainly isn’t going to include Hell or Dean Winchester.
“So let me get this straight,” Dean says slowly, running a roughened hand over his face. Staring at Rade, who had just finished her explanation of Manticore and Terminal City, he clarifies, “You guys were manufactured, forced against your will to become soldiers who kill or else are killed, were experimented upon, escaped, and started your own crappy city thing? You’re right-that’s pretty hard to believe.”
Rade sighs, and kind of wants to smack Dean around a little, but given his current state as well as hers as a respectable medic, she merely remains sitting with her legs crisscrossed opposite Dean on the metal table. “It’s all just science, Dean,” she responds, telling herself she’s not defending Manticore. “I mean, state-of-the-art science, but it’s not extraterrestrial.” At Dean’s still dubious look-it’s all too, despite what Rade had said, X-Files for him-Rade retorts, “Fine. What do you got, then?”
She almost expects Dean to just renege on his deal, to determine he’s not up for explaining after all; and, considering all that she’s seen and heard of him, she wouldn’t be surprised. But Dean also hasn’t struck her as the kind of guy to back down in the face of hardship, even if it’s extremely painful. And, to her relief and curiosity, Dean begins.
“I’m a hunter,” he starts. “I mean, I guess I was a hunter.” Rade suspends her questioning on that last fact; Dean sure as hell doesn’t look like the undead to her. And he also doesn’t seem like the guy to wait patiently just to shoot a deer.
“A hunter of what, exactly?” Rade asks.
Dean stalls, the cautious part of his mind wondering why in the world he’s about to tell some…thing…about his past. He doesn’t even know her, not really, and she’s actually pretty damn abrasive. Sure, she’s not for the coddling like Max or Cindy seemed to be, but still. That doesn’t mean he owes her something. Especially not what’s happened to him; he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to tell anyone about that. Rade can preach her sob story all she wants to him, but Dean knows it’s freakin’ translucent in comparison to his. And yet, if he can tell her the other parts of his still unsavory past, maybe it’ll get him an ally in this whole mess.
“Demons,” Dean answers after a while, the words feeling like sick acid on his tongue as flashbacks flare rapid fire through his mind. “Demons, ghosts, tulpas, shapeshifters, a whole host of other supernatural bottom feeders.”
Rade stares blankly at him, seriously pondering if she should have reconsidered the possibility of Dean having a few screws loose. She’s willing to accept a lot, but this is out of her job description. “Look, if you’re going to lie, at least make it convincing,” Rade snaps, about two seconds away from getting off the table, finding the bottle of lorazepam and doping Dean up again.
“I’m not lying!” Dean protests violently, his eyes blazing the same sentiments. “Jesus, even you-what did you call yourselves?-transgenics don’t think I’m telling the truth. Well, you’re wrong. All of you are.”
Whether Rade trusts him or not (and, to be honest, she’s leaning towards not), she’s going to humor him. If nothing else than to, well, sate her curiosity. It’s not every day you meet someone who proclaims he fought demons. Then she remembers something. “Wait, is that what you were talking about when you accused Alec of being a shapeshifter?” she asks. “With the silver knife thing?”
Dean nods his head despondently. “Yeah, it was,” he answers. “I was hoping that he was one, actually. Which says a lot, considering I hate the damn things more than almost all the lower-level bastards out there. One screwed up my life, got me tracked for multiple murders-it’s not like I wanted to let that happen again. But I guess he’s not a shapeshifter, whatever that means.”
“So you’re saying that the crimes you committed-Max told me-weren’t your fault? It was all some…er…shapeshifter?” The word sounds alien in her mouth, but she’s fighting through it.
“Well, not all of them,” Dean answers awkwardly. “But most of the killing was necessary. You know, salting and burning, changelings, that kind of thing.”
“I don’t know,” Rade dissents, disliking the phrase. “This is all too whacked.”
Dean shrugs, then instantly regrets it, putting a hand to his shoulder. “I’ve heard that one before,” he grinds out against the pain. Rade gets up and walks over to the group of medicine bottles, grabbing the morphine and beginning to draw some out. “Knock it off,” Dean snaps, halting her. “I’m not an invalid. I’ve had a hell of a lot more pain than this. And besides, morphine slows me down.”
“You think you’re going to be fighting something?” Rade replies caustically, unable to imagine Dean coming to blows with his shoulder, even if it is back in its socket. “Not on my watch, Winchester.”
Dean smirks and starts to say something, which Rade’s just about positive wouldn’t be acceptable for younger audiences, when the doors to the medical wing are burst open. “Hey!” Rade snaps, turning her attention there. “What happened to ‘you disturb me I put you in an Ordinary hospital myself’?”
“Rade,” says Dalton, his face no longer looking impish, but rather distressed. He spares a glance to Dean, and although his eyes nearly bug out of his head-it’s obvious he can tell it’s not Alec, but is Alec at the same time; Dean, of course, merely stares-he doesn’t have time to dwell before he reveals a transhuman behind him, struggling to hold up a very familiar monocled brethren.
“What’s going on?” Rade demands, feeling her face flush white as she sees Dix’s bloodied and scraped skin, and obviously broken legs. “What the fuck just happened, Dalton? Answer me!”
“We don’t know!” Dalton cries, his words echoing only truth. “I mean, one minute everything’s fine, he’s just typing away, and the next there’s this explosion and Dix is like this!”
Rade’s mind is full of equally imperishable questions, one of them being how she didn’t hear a freakin’ explosion. She voices just that. Dalton simply looks at her, and she gets it. “The doors, they’re soundproof,” Rade speaks, knowing the heavy steel doors, left over from the biotech lab before, blocked out most sounds. Rade most often kept them open except in times of desperation-in this case, Dean-which would explain her lack of noticing something blowing up. Someone, rather.
Dean hops off the table, holding his injured arm to his side, and walks over to the healthy transhuman, who obviously wasn’t built for strength. Rade assumes the others are taking care of the explosion aftermath, the smoke from which she can smell just from the brief period the doors were open.
“Take five, pal,” Dean commands, his rough voice still intimidating. Bending down, he clenches his jaw and grits his teeth, before putting one arm under Dix’s legs, and the other underneath his head.
He starts to lift Dix, Rade temporarily paralyzed, and he gets him off of the ground, before his mask of indifference falls with the sheer pain of an unrepaired torn rotator cuff and barely-reset shoulder takes the best of him. His bad arm shakes, fresh blood welling and waterfalling from his wound, but right as he starts to drop Dix not of his own accord, Dalton blurs over and takes up the slack, regarding Dean with an entirely different light.
They manage to set Dix down on the gurney Dean had previously occupied, the latter falling against the wall and then sliding down, injury leaching all the strength and color out of him. Rade, out of her haze, comes to and registered what had occurred. “Winchester!” she yells, staring down at Dean like an avenging angel. “What the hell are you doing? You probably just fucked up that damn shoulder all over again!”
“Rade,” Dalton intervenes, gesturing helplessly to Dix’s body. “Please.”
Still seething, but knowing her priorities, and knowing whose damage is worse, she shoos Dean and Dalton out of the immediate vicinity, then turns around and starts taking stock of Dix, wishing she didn’t know on whom she’d be operating. For Dean’s part, he presses against the wall like it can take away the hurt, his eyes shut tight against the un-morphined shoulder and regretting that shot of analgesic he’d refused. Not that, again, he’d not had worse, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like a bitch on the warpath.
“Dude,” Dalton says after a few moments, coming to sit against the wall by Dean. He’s still floored by the whole thing, unable to believe Dean’s, you know, real, but for the immediacy, he’s seeing past that. “You’re badass.”
Through his white veil of agony, Dean manages a breathy chuckle. “And you’re a wimp, kid,” he retorts, without knowing even to whom he’s talking.
Dalton takes offense that he knows is irrational, his manly pride taking a fighting stance. “Right back at you. Crying over a rotator cuff.”
That gets Dean’s attention, and in an instant, his eyes are open, green eyes fixed on Dalton’s brown. “Oh, don’t even start with me, half-pint,” Dean retorts, glancing down at his arm, the top of which is completely coated in red, and running in rivulets down his forearm. “Fan-fucking-tastic,” he mutters.
Dalton peers at Dean suspiciously. “No, seriously,” he counters slowly. “That really shouldn’t be a bad injury. You should be fine, blood congealing…what generation are you? Can’t be X5…”
“Generation of bad hair and the gods of Metallica,” Dean smiles in response.
Dalton, of course, misses the allusion entirely. “Gods of lustered alloys?” he asks, completely lost.
Raising an eyebrow, Dean seems to remember that none of the people, extremely unfortunately, even know who Metallica is, let alone the other rock cornerstones the likes of AC/DC, Nirvana, Black Sabbath, and all the rest. “Rock, man,” Dean corrects. “Classic rock bands. You guys are seriously in the dark about good music.”
Finally, Dalton’s over-intelligent brain allows a possibility to come forth. “Wait a second…” he starts, giving Dean’s fit, but internally broken, body a once-over. “Are you an Ordinary?”
“Hey, in no freakin’ reality am I ordinary,” Dean gripes sulkily. “But to you freaks of nature, I guess that’s what you call normal humans.”
Dalton forgives Dean’s retort, in favor of reeling over this new information. “So…what relation are you to Alec, then? I mean, you-”
“-look just like him, yeah, I got the picture,” Dean finishes in a respectable amount of resentment. “I don’t know. I bet you guys are all over that. Or at least that chick and her white supremacist are.”
Unable to hold back a snort of full laughter-despite the dire situation that’s going on right inside the doors to their left-and Dean looks a little taken aback at Dalton’s favorable reaction. “You’re like…the first Ordinary ever to have that view of the guy.”
This is news to Dean, who, the moment he’d seen Logan, really didn’t like him. Something about the aura of preeminence that imbued the guy’s entire being just grated on Dean’s core values. If he hated Sam’s college persona, there was no chance he’d like Logan’s twenty-four/seven persona of the same brand.
“If you don’t mind, kid-”
“Dalton.”
“Whatever. If you don’t mind, I’d like to suffer in peace,” Dean declares, kind of wanting that towel back to sop up all the excess blood pooling on his skin. “It’s easier to hum ‘Kashmir’ without pipsqueak chatter.”
If Dalton’s irked by Dean’s snubbing, he doesn’t show it. Most likely owing to the occasional rapid-fire mood changes that Alec had. He’s also positive that Dean’s not referring to the area between India and Pakistan when he says “Kashmir,” and he assumes it’s some song or something, but he’s not going to check that with Dean. He can see when a soldier’s trying to deal with pain, and Dean reminds Dalton of a soldier (or at least as much as any of the rest of them do), so Dalton understands. He’s had, after all, his own fair share of wounds.
That doesn’t mean, though, that he can’t offer a little assistance. Taking off his overshirt, he hands it to Dean. Dean opens his eyes and regards Dalton for a second before accepting the sacrifice, and puts it on his shoulder, the cloth absorbing the red, viscous fluid. Dean doesn’t say anything to Dalton, but Dalton’s seen the look of relative gratitude in Alec’s eyes more than once to know that Dean is grateful.
Granted, he’s still confused as hell as to who Dean is, and what his connection to Alec happens to be, but there’s more important things at stake. He just hopes that Dix isn’t out of commission indefinitely. Now that the event has actually sunk in, and Dalton knows what’s going on behind closed doors as well as in the command center, his stomach gives a roll of dread.
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