SPN/DA crossover fic: Of Desire and the Status Quo (28/38)
Story Title: Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter Title: I Fall to Pieces Now, a Broken Mirror
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: 3,609
Disclaimer: Same stuff applies as in the first chapter. Oh, and unfortunately I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter XXVII: I Fall to Pieces Now, a Broken Mirror
When Alec feels a tiredness behind his eyes, he chalks it up to simply being tired, the stress of Dean’s arrival adding to the stress of Terminal City and White and everything just overworking him. He doesn’t feel the strain as a full-body ache, just a pulling against his temples, but figures it doesn’t mean anything. (Tries to figure, anyway.)
And when he realizes he’s blinking more than normal and feeling on-edge, he does his best to clamp down on it, refusing to acknowledge what he’s darkly afraid might be happening.
It gets to the point where Dean, about six hundred miles in, notices his carmate’s discomfort. “I told you, pit stops are chosen by the driver, not shotgun,” he cites, the rule going right alongside the choice of music one.
Alec flicks his eyes over to Dean, and commands himself to relax. “Nah, dude, I’m fine,” he says in excuse, his voice level. “Just tired is all.”
A faint bell goes off in Dean’s head at Alec’s words. Because they’re the same words Dean himself had said so many times to Sam, and each time it had been an understatement. Sam had never caught on, not really, and while Dean may be slow on the uptake on some things, he’s generally pretty up-to-date on what occurs in his own mind.
“What, your whacked genetics make you more susceptible to exhaustion or something?” Dean asks, thinking that it’s rather unfair if the transgenics have no flaws whatsoever. Alec doesn’t answer, his jaw tight when Dean looks over at him. “Hey! I asked you a question.”
The authority in Dean’s tone doesn’t go unnoticed by Alec, and, well, not all of his training had gone out the window when Max burned down Manticore. “We can run for days,” Alec replies, breathing methodically.
Dean wants to beeline straight for wherever Sam is, and looks at the squiggly horizon as if he can make out his brother’s freakishly tall frame. But, for all the things Hell took from him, they hadn’t managed to take away his humanity. Not all of it, anyway. Yeah, Sam’s his number one priority, and Alec’s little more than a pain in his ass, but that doesn’t mean Dean wishes him harm or something. (Plus, awkward car rides are never fun.)
“Okay, then what?” Dean persists, elbowing Alec roughly. “I stole a gun from your guys’ armory-I’ll use it, I swear.”
Alec looks at Dean, unsurprised at the theft, and also not attempting to wonder where Dean stored the firearm. Thinks it’s better that way. Dean, however, is just a little bit more surprised. Alec’s face, he can see now, is covered in a light sheen of sweat, and his fingers are digging so deeply into the upholstery that Dean wouldn’t be shocked to discover he’d punctured through to the foam.
Dean’s seen enough sickness and injury aftermaths to recognize the fever brightness in Alec’s eyes, and sighs. “Don’t even try and fake this with me,” he demands, scouting for an exit. “What’s going on? You got a bullet in you that you neglected to mention? Got some flu thing?”
“No,” Alec bites out, knowing that, one way or another, this is going to get out. “Just…just a tiny issue I have.”
“Should’ve figured you’re as stubborn at admitting you’re sick as I am,” Dean grumbles, finding an off-ramp and taking it. The town’s not much more than a tiny general store and an empty parking lot, but Dean pulls badly into a space, shutting off the car and looking at Alec. “Explain. Now.”
Alec’s teeth are grinding together in the effort to keep from showing any tremors, but even his strong will isn’t enough to overpower biology. Dean throws off his seatbelt and comes around to Alec’s side of the car, kneeling on the baseboard of the car frame.
Alec looks even worse from close up, and now those little warning bells are full-on sirens. “Talk to me,” Dean barks, never one for the bedside manner, especially in the few instances when panic starts to set in.
Alec feels it coming on, and knows this time, it won’t just be a headache or fatigue. “Shit,” is all he can say, and closes his eyes.
Dean grips Alec’s shoulders with bruising force, trying his best to understand what Alec’s problem is. “What? Seriously, dude-”
“You, uh-you got any milk?” Alec manages to whisper, before going rigid in Dean’s arms, his muscles locking up as his brain decides to wage an electrical crusade on his body.
Dean stares at him like he’s crazy, but then Alec’s body finally surrenders, and he starts convulsing, violent tremors shaking throughout his limbs. “Alec!” Dean yells, eyes wide. “What the hell’s going on?”
He doesn’t think that Alec just might not be able to speak, but then remembers his request and, having dealt with weirder-although admittedly usually by supernatural means-things before, he darts outside of the room, skidding to a stop by the tiny general store. Thanking no one in particular that it’s open, he rushes in and throws open the refrigerator doors, grabbing a carton of the white liquid. At the moment not giving a shit about his “hard-earned” cash, he throws down some bills on the counter and hurries back to the car. He would have just stolen the item, but he-and Alec-doesn’t have the means this time to escape and evade.
He’s pretty sure the cashier yells something behind him, but he can’t be fucked to pay attention to it. Dean holds down Alec’s seizing body as best he can, tries not to flash back to when Sam had his visions, and spills some of the milk into Alec’s mouth, fairly sure that at least some made it down his throat.
Finally, after what seems to Dean like absolute days, Alec’s tremors subside a little, and he focuses on Dean’s face, the features completely freaked and worried beyond belief. “G-Guess I got s-some ’splainin’ to do…” he says unevenly.
“Damn fucking straight you do!” Dean shouts, the rage merely a transference of his insane distress. “What the hell was that?”
Alec tries to sit up, but Dean pushes him back into the reclined chair roughly; Alec had realized shortly after the attempt that his muscles still twitched enough to not be trustworthy in sitting up anyway. “They’re called seizures,” he snarks, and rather wants to shrink away from Dean’s DEFCON 1 glare. “Okay, fine,” he concedes, recognizing that beneath the glare is a shitload of concern. “Manticore thought they made us all perfect, genes totally flawless, whatever, but they hadn’t figured out we had a serotonin deficiency until it was too late, and if we don’t get tryptophan supplements, well…seizures.”
Although the shakes are never exactly good, Dean finds himself in a weird sort of gratefulness that Alec isn’t epileptic or something. He’s not sure how he’d be able to finagle that medical condition. Then Alec’s words strike something in his memory. “Wait a second,” he says, rifling through the fuzziness from when he’d been kidnapped. “That guy that yanked me…he gave me trypto-whatever, I think. I didn’t know why, just thought it was some sort of nasty drug again.”
“White thought you were me,” Alec explains, he and Max having decided that’s the most likely cause. “He knew that transgenics had that problem, and didn’t want to risk you seizing, because that’d delay his torture or something, so he gave you the drug, not knowing that it’d overdose you.”
“Gee, thanks,” Dean says sarcastically. “’Preciate that. It’s just my luck to overdose on something boring while being chemically torn apart. At least they didn’t resort to lame ploys like that.”
Alec thinks he knows what Dean’s talking about, or at least what Dean had termed “them” as. Not that he believes him, obviously, and he doubts Dean’ll tell him any more than he already had, but still. The least he can do is humor the guy. After all, Dean had witnessed him succumbing to his Manticore limitations, almost the most vulnerable he could be in front of another person.
Now that he thinks about it, actually, even Max hadn’t seen him with the seizures. He guesses she’s probably assumed that Manticore had fixed the deficiency, and so just hadn’t asked about it. Or simply didn’t care.
As if Dean sensed what Alec was ruminating over, he asks, “Well, what do you and Max do when this happens? I mean, you’ve got to have pills, right?”
Alec refuses to meet Dean’s eyes for a moment. “We ran out,” he says. At Dean’s disbelief, he runs a quivering hand over his damp face. “Okay, I hadn’t run out. But Dalton had, and-well, I wasn’t going to let him experience this. I just told him we had some extra.”
Dean wants to say something like, “You’re an idiot, Alec,” but can’t bring himself to do so. Primarily because, Dean realizes with less shock than he’d expected, it’s the exact thing that he would do. For Christ’s sake, he’d sacrificed his soul for Sam. If anyone could relate to Alec’s putting himself in death’s way, it’s Dean. He idly wonders if it’s in his genes, or if it’s just something the two of them happen to have in common.
“You’re not going to tell me that was a stupid thing to do?” Alec asks, frankly a little floored.
Dean’s mouth raises in a self-deprecating smile. “Not this time,” he answers. “Let’s just say I get where you were coming from.”
Alec knows he shouldn’t press, but he can’t help it. He knows almost zilch about Dean’s background-his real background, not some Fed’s file-and it’s about damn time Dean tells him something. “What do you mean?”
Silence falls between the two men, a silence that isn’t incredibly tense, but also isn’t incredibly warm and fuzzy, either. His head is still spinning, but Alec ignores it, in favor of sitting up straight, trying to show Dean he was just in a brief moment of weakness that for sure wouldn’t happen again. To Alec’s surprise, Dean sits on the edge of Alec’s seat, his eyes sharp, like he’s taking in absolutely every muscle movement Alec has.
“You’re making me kinda uncomfortable,” Alec comments flatly, attempting to glare, but knowing his glazed eyes aren’t doing the job. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Dean falters, but then gives an unhappy smile. “You kind of reminded me of Sam, to be honest,” Dean confesses. Alec frowns, affixed. “Sam had…visions. Like, premonitions. He’d have killer headaches that he couldn’t prevent. I kind of had to do the same thing with him as I did you. I mean, I didn’t give him milk or anything, and you’re not warning me about someone getting murdered, but…”
Alec stares at Dean like he’s seeing him in an entirely different light. And, truthfully, he is. Talking about Sam to him was more than Dean had ever done to anyone else Alec knows. “Visions, huh,” he says, feeling like he’s treading on dangerously thin ice. He isn’t sure whether this mention of Sam was a one-time thing, or if Dean would actually open up a little. “So you’re able to accept that, uh, that Sam was psychic, but you can’t accept that I was made in a lab by megalomaniacs? That we just might share the same DNA?”
Dean laughs, and Alec thinks it’s the closest to a real one he’s ever heard thus far. “Well, Sam had a reason for getting the visions. Now, if you really were a shapeshifter, I could accept it. Granted, by this point you’d be long dead with silver in your blood, but I guess that’s beside the point.”
Alec’s face is carefully schooled. “At least you’re not accusing me of being a fictional creature anymore. That’s progress.”
“Fictional?” Dean repeats incredulously. “Let me tell you something, kid: you wouldn’t be saying that if one framed you for murder and almost got you S.W.A.T.-sniped.”
“You’re seriously playing that shapeshifter card again? And now you’re adding that one committed your crimes?”
“Well, the St. Louis and Milwaukee murders anyway,” Dean qualifies. “But I was the one that took the fall for it. I had my own personal Fed, actually. Who definitely wasn’t shy on guns. Really, it wasn’t necessary to bring out the snipers. They should’ve known I’d kick their asses regardless of what ammo they used.”
Alec falls quiet, avoiding Dean’s sight. Dean, of course, picks up on this instantly.
“What?” he asks. “You’re not going to go into convulsions again, are you?”
“Not now,” Alec says, knowing he will need to get some tryptophan at one point. He can’t use milk forever. “It’s just-you saying snipers, I…that is…”
“Oh. Right.”
Dean looks at the asphalt of the parking lot as if it can give him the answers he wants, but the blacktop tells nothing.
“Why’d you stay?” he asks abruptly.
“What?” Alec sputters, the question entirely unexpected.
“At-At Manticore,” Dean clarifies. “Why’d you stay? They make you kill people, they give you this brain deficiency that gives you seizures, but you stayed. Why?”
Alec swallows. He’d thought he was past this, that he and Dean had been in the trenches long enough, so to speak, that he could confess this. But his brain and his mouth aren’t communicating very well.
“Rachel Berrisford,” is the only thing Alec offers.
Dean waits for elaboration, but Alec might as well have slammed a door in his face for all the decryption he’ll give. Dean makes a note to bring it up again; it’s obviously something that’s grating Alec’s heart from the inside out, and Dean intends to find out what it is. After Sam, that is. Sam comes first. Always.
“All right, so where can we get this medicine stuff for you?” he asks instead, changing the subject to one a little less soul-wrenching.
Alec brushes his hair out of his eyes and looks up at Dean, glad for the switch. “It’s not Tylenol,” he says. “You can’t just get it out of a drugstore. In T.C., we put together a tac team and either arrange a meeting with black market dealers, or else just steal it from pharmaceutical companies. Neither option is doable between just you and me.”
“I can-I mean, I can finish the rest of this myself,” Dean says with forced indifference, “if you need to…you know, get back to Seattle. Fix yourself up.”
Alec laughs. “This ain’t my first brush with the shakes,” he dictates, putting as light a tone on it as possible. “And I didn’t travel this far and put up with your moodiness just to turn back now. I can subsist on milk for a while; or at least until we find Sam. Besides, I really, really don’t want to face Hurricane Max right now.”
Dean withholds his smile, and pats Alec’s knee once before going back around to his side of the car.
Once the mileage signs add Asheville to their list instead of just Charlotte, Alec decides it’s time to bite the bullet. “Okay…so what exactly are we supposed to say?” he asks. “Our government may not be as up to snuff as it was back ten years ago, but, and this does pain me to admit, they’re not totally decrepit. They’re not just gonna let two randoms bust in there and hand over sat data.”
Dean gives Alec a smirk of mischief, a glimmer in his eyes of which Alec is curious-and more than a little apprehensive-to find out the cause. “Who says we’re going in as randoms?”
He fears.
“Wasn’t that where we were supposed to go?” Alec inquires, looking behind him at the street they just passed which would lead to the NESDIS facility.
“We gotta do two quick things first,” Dean announces.
He stops in a small, graffitied erstwhile shopping center, and Alec peers through the windshield to see a rundown formal attire store. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Dean shoves him out of the car, then gets out himself. “Figure out my size,” he says. “If you’re done before I am, go to the car and stay there.”
“Where’re you going?”
“You got your specialties, I got mine,” says Dean cryptically.
Alec exhales in frustration. “Who woulda thought undermining the law and all mores of society would be the only things that make you happy?”
“Happy” isn’t quite the word Dean would use, but he will say that reverting back into these such activities is bringing back good memories. He tries not to imagine Sam rolling his eyes and reminding him of how twisted he is, even as Sam himself breaks into a house or building. “Yeah, well,” Dean shrugs, walking backwards away from Alec, “what can I say? Doesn’t matter if it’s in 2008 or 2021-laws still annoy me. And I feel it’s my duty to right them.”
“Dean!” Alec yells after Dean’s retreating back, frustrated. Dean, predictably, doesn’t respond, leaving Alec in front of the store. “Dick.”
However, despite Alec’s irritation, he walks into the establishment anyway. The cashier, sketchy as he himself is, eyes him seedily, and Alec really tries to ignore him. He finds two similar, mostly clean suits, one of them only slightly bigger than his size to accommodate Dean’s musculature. Alec’s fine with the way he’s built-lean builds are ideal for sneaking and creeping-but Dean does have the extra brawn, and Alec isn’t so cruel as to purposefully buy an ill-fitting monkey suit. Maybe for Logan, but not Dean. Forking over most of the hustled pool money to the cashier, Alec takes his purchases and sulks back to the Mustang, chucking the suits in the backseat.
He’s still sitting there twenty minutes later, the only things changed being his level of impatience and thoughts to just get out and find Dean himself. Before he can kick the man’s ass, though, Dean slides into the seat next to Alec, the tiniest bit of color in his up-till-now-gray cheeks. He hands something to Alec, stowing the other in the door handle compartment. Perturbed, Alec opens the black fold and is legitimately surprised to see a small picture of himself looking stoic, below it a fake signature and name, and next to it a shiny gold badge.
“‘NSA’?” Alec reads, eyebrows shooting up. “You’re not serious.”
“As a heart attack,” Dean confirms without missing a beat. “Just go in with confidence, and pretend you’re the awesome drummer from Black Sabbath, and you’re good.”
Alec stares at Dean, unamused. “It’s entirely too scary how easily you faked this. And how the hell did you get my picture?”
“Pot and kettle, dude. Thought you were some big man assassin.”
Alec glares.
“As for the picture, easy,” Dean replies. “Just took a picture of myself and…de-aged it a bit.”
“This is never going to work,” says Alec dubiously. “You can’t bullshit NESDIS with a home copy machine.”
Dean puts on a face of lifelong suffering. “Give me some credit,” he says. “I’ve been doing this longer’n you’ve been alive. It’s foolproof.”
“Words of the damned, my friend,” Alec warns. “If this crashes and burns, I am not going to jail for you.”
As Dean puts the car into gear and speeds onto the freeway, he looks sideways at his passenger. “Oh, please,” he remarks. “Like Max wouldn’t bust you out without a second thought.”
Alec chokes on the Coke he’d-evidently stupidly-sipped. “’Scuse me?” he says in disbelief. “I’m the bane of her existence.”
Dean laughs, grinning shrewdly. “You transgenics are so freaking blind, it’s hilarious.”
“Huh?”
“Why would she keep saving you, dumbass?” Dean asks, glad that it’s Manticore’s fault Alec’s clueless. “I sincerely doubt she’d do that if she hated you. And in any event, she’s more of a bitch to you than anyone else-even me. Playground rules.”
Alec’s brow furrows at this Dean-observation. It’s easy to deny it; after all, Dean’s a crazy psycho murderer. (Right?) “I think White scrambled your brain,” Alec scoffs. “You’re way off base here.”
Dean sighs. “The last time I did this was for Sammy in the eighth grade,” he muses in exasperation. “Let me tell you, you may’ve got x-ray vision or whatever, but you sure as hell didn’t get my perceptiveness.”
“I resent that,” Alec objects hotly, choosing not to ruminate on the fact that he’s sounding like a human twelve-year-old. “I’ve got a one-ninety I.Q., thanks.”
“How nice for you,” Dean deadpans, irked at all the jokes of his supposed stupidity he’d gotten. “Firstly, I’ve got a one sixty-two, and I wasn’t even made in a test tube, so shut it. Secondly, quantum physics ain’t helping you in figuring out if a chick likes you.”
Alec makes a noise of protest. “I know quite well when a girl likes me,” he says confidently. “I do pretty well in that department.”
“Did not need to know that,” Dean winces in disgust. “Make you a deal. You’re good at telling if someone’s lying, right?”
“Yeah…” Alec affirms, guessing that Dean already knew this, considering he’s pretty good at the same.
“Great. Then when next you see Max, ask her straight out. Her face’ll tell you the rest.”
Alec crosses his arms over his chest, sinking lower in his seat. “You’re crazy,” he mutters.
“So I’ve been told,” Dean answers easily, pulling up alongside the curb by a gas station. Handing Alec his suit and grabbing his own, he promises, “But not in this, I’m not. Lying is my specialty, and awesomely enough, it works for other people, too. Now get your ass changed. We got work to do.”
Next