Migratory Birds [Supernatural/X-,Men Movieverse crossover, gen, PG-13, 1/2]
It's finally apocalypse day! And with it comes the large fic of doom! :D Okay, now we're playing a game. It's called 'guess which XMM mutants are Ale's favorite!' You only get one chance. Aaaand, go. It's weird, though - I've only seen X-3 once, and have been trying to forget it ever happened since, and with all the comics I've been reading all summer long, I spent a long time trying to remember canon, lol. At one point I included Genosha and then had to cut it out, and the same with Pietro and Wanda, haha.
Seriously, I had a great time writing this, and this is truly one of the most entertaining ficathons ever. :DDD
Title: Migratory Birds
Word Count: 11,426
Fandom: Supernatural/X-Men Movieverse crossover
Summary: When the end comes, one brother is on one side, and the other on the opposite.
Author Notes: Betaed by the awesome mellafe and amchara, written for kellifer_fic in the occasion of apocalyptothon. Sort of AU-ish for SPN, post X-3 for X-Men.
I was going to do upload some end-of-days themed songs, but Muxtape decided to get in trouble with the RIAA right this day, lol.
Sam’s powers manifest when he’s ten, when he tears half the house down.
----
Their lives are weird enough that something as small as Sam being able to destroy everything he touches hardly makes a blip in their radar for the longest time. The word Mutant starts popping up in the newspapers, though, and Sam once gets beaten for shredding a notebook by mistake. Dean teaches him some moves, and the next day, Sam gets expelled for giving the offender a bloody nose and a black eye. He chants It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, in his tiny, broken voice for a day straight, and Dean goes white-knuckled with indignation. He pats Sam on the head, tells him everything will be all right and that the town sucked, anyway, and then he goes and breaks into the principal’s house and writes ‘Asshole’ on his bedroom wall in neon green paint.
Sam’s a smart kid. He learns to make people see him the way he wants them to.
He spends most of his teenage years trying to be as normal as possible, all polo shirts and big smile and perfect grades, fitting in everywhere he goes. Dean, who wears ratty Metallica shirts and bangs the entire cheerleading squad under the bleachers and organizes burping contests in the cafeteria doesn’t get it, finds the idea of being just like everyone else absurd. Then he catches Sam using his powers in secret, hands against a rusty pot that crumples onto itself, and sees the look on Sam’s face, both exhilarated and appalled at his own taste for destruction. He stops leaving the half-sarcastic, half-truthful notes on his pillow or school books saying Be yourself, Sammy, you’re a beautiful butterfly as you are! surrounded by pink hearts. The little bitch didn’t appreciate his tender brotherly gestures, anyway.
Sam’s powers are an incredible help on hunts. Or whenever they can’t find the can opener. Dean encourages him to use them, goes as far as inventing excuses in which he may need them, because he figures they’re a part of Sam, just like a kidney or something like that, and he might need them for living, whether Sam likes it or not. With a little training, Sam’s powers actually evolve, become strong enough that he doesn’t even have to be in contact with whatever he wants to destroy. Dean actually swaggers the day after the breakthrough, smugly takes all the credit and Sam calls him a fucking idiot, laughing.
For the most part, he just wishes Sam didn’t have to be so alone.
---
Dean manifests when he’s nineteen, almost on the verge of turning out to be human after all, and the look on his father’s eyes, the pained one, has him silent and withdrawn for a couple of days. He says he likes it, though, having another way of being able to keep his family safe.
Sam likes it too, secretly, mostly because it means that he’s not alone anymore.
----
The only time their father ever mentions Sam’s mutation is when Sam announces he’s going to Stanford. And to think I still raised you, even knowing what you are, he says, and everything goes silent and Sam opens his eyes very wide and Dean wants to yell, wants to hit something, preferably his father, because of all the things he could have said to make Sam leave them forever, that was the worst.
Sam leaves, and their father regrets those words for the rest of his life, because Dean knows he never meant them, that he was just too scared of having his boy walk out on him, alone and unprotected.
He tells Sam, later, how Dad would start apologizing every time he drank too much, or every time something got too close and he ended up bleeding everywhere, but he’s not sure Sam ever believes him.
----
Jess is a sweet girl, but she’s also a smart one, and she thinks long and hard before deciding whether she wants to stay with Sam after she finds out about him being a mutant by accident.
She stays, and then she dies, and it makes it even more painful, knowing that she was the one girl with whom Sam knew he could be completely himself with. Everything after her death is a blur - Stanford, classes, her blood on his forehead as she died above him on the ceiling, covered in fire. There is only the road and the Impala beneath him and Dean treading carefully around him and their father, ever-present even when missing.
Their first hunt together after Jess’s funeral, he rips the Wendigo open from the inside out, doesn’t even blink, and Dean watches him, face sprayed with blood, with something akin to fear.
Sam shrugs it off, and doesn’t much care.
----
After Stanford, Sam starts using his powers almost openly.
“What the hell, dude,” Dean says after Sam rips the lock off their jammed motel room door instead of kicking it open. “I thought you were all about secrecy and subtlety and all of those other annoying esses,” he says, surprised. Then again, everything about this new Sam, taciturn and angry, surprises him these days.
Sam shrugs. “I’m done hiding who I am. It’s not like I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Well that’s all very good, but it won’t stop people from being, you know, people. In case you haven’t noticed, being a mutant isn’t exactly hot for the season.”
“I tried normal once, Dean. It didn’t work out so well.”
Dean knows that look, the one he gets whenever he thinks of Jess, so he doesn’t push it.
----
The government starts talking of Sentinels in 2006. That’s when things start going wrong between them.
----
They watch the manifestations and speeches and riots on TV in between jobs. Dean always keeps his finger on the channel button, as if wanting to reassure himself that he can stop himself from watching, from knowing, but he never does press it.
It’s an anti-mutant rally this time, mourning for a teenager that was killed by a young mutant, a kid no older than ten. The crying people being interviewed don’t mention the fact that the kid had almost been stoned to death, and that he’d lashed out in self-defense. They always seem to forget details like that, people on TV. They’re burning human-sized dolls with blue sprayed skin. There’s signs saying death to the muties hanging from their necks.
Humans. They do like getting their point across.
They’re sitting cross-legged on Sam’s bed, shoes off but socks on, sharing a pizza. There’s a grease-stain on the cheap coverlet from where a piece of pepperoni fell on it.
“God, this is horrible,” Sam says, grimacing, and Dean takes a swig from his beer instead of stating the obvious.
Sam stares at him with a look of pure disgust. “Doesn’t it bother you at all, Dean? This is your race they’re attacking,” he says, lips curled, and it sometimes scares Dean a bit, Sam’s intensity.
“Fuck that race shit, we’re all human beings, Sam,” Dean says, angry himself. “I’m not about to lower myself to their level, that’s all.”
Sam snorts. The image cuts to the kid, Brian Emery, age ten, wearing orange overalls and sitting in the corner of a prison cell, shaking and trying not to look at the camera. He’ll be tried like an adult. It makes Dean feel sick to his stomach.
“Someone should put a stop to this,” Sam says, flustered and breathing hard with indignation. “Someone should make this right.”
“Who? That psycho Magneto and his jolly band of brainwashed followers? They only make things worse.”
“Yes. Maybe. Magneto - he could make this right.”
The way he says it, completely convinced, makes Dean shiver. Sam does nothing by halves. “Please tell me you don’t buy his crap, Sam. Please.”
Sam shakes his head. “We’re not human, Dean. And watching this, I don’t think I want to be.”
----
A Black Dog in Idaho and Sam feels raw, weary. The creature is too powerful and too filled with magic for his powers to be any good, and they only seem to make it angrier. It comes at him, roaring, drizzling saliva from in between yellow fangs. He aims for its liver, feels it shred and tear as his hand mimics claws, but then the thing is on him and he releases his hold with a grunt of surprise. Sharp teeth sink on his arm and he cries out, feels warm blood seeping out under his sleeve.
Dean shoots the thing on the head, and it whines, far too much like a dog, before turning on him. Sam pants, throws his head down on the ground for a moment and breathes, tries to clear his head. He’s running on adrenaline and fear and not much else. The victim of the week, a middle-aged salesman, is cowering by the corner, scratching at the plaster. Sam rises and goes to him, knowing that Dean can handle the skinwalker for a moment - unless he’s injured, nothing can’t get past his force field, and it’s a relief, at least, especially knowing how much Dean likes putting himself at risk.
The man cringes away when Sam offers him his hand. “Don’t touch me, you freak!” he shrieks, high-pitched, and Sam starts shaking with fury, every muscle tense and teeth grinding.
“I’m trying to help you, you bigoted moron.” He ends up having to knock him unconscious when the guy keeps on crawling away from him, yelling at Sam to get away. He throws him outside the house with rather more force than necessary, but doesn’t feel especially apologetic.
The creature burns, but Sam feels nothing of the usual post-hunt high.
When they go out the man is still unconscious, lying still on the grass, limbs akimbo, in the exact place Sam left him. “So he preferred the blood-thirsty beast to the mutant that was trying to save his ass? Man, that’s messed up,” Dean says, digging his boot into the guy’s kidneys. His lip is curled, but he doesn’t mean much by it, just that this particular guy is an asshole and it’s a shame and that’s it.
Sam, Sam doesn’t see it that way. He’s tired of being feared more than the things he kills to keep assholes like this one safe.
He vows to make it stop.
----
They fight just outside of Minneapolis, after ten hours of driving. They’ve taken the art of bickering to a whole new level in the years since Sam got back from Stanford, but this is new. There’s a real bite to the accusations, to the insults, and they’re both aiming to hurt the other one as much as they can.
It starts about the usual subjects; their messed up life growing up, their father’s never ending stubbornness, his readiness to risk his sons for his vengeance. Then it escalates until it’s about Your fucking blind belief in this stupid megalomaniac wearing a cape and a funny helmet, and Your ridiculous pacifist views. At least I’m not afraid of making a stand, Dean, and I’m taking my species’ side.
They shout hard enough to drown out Robert Plant’s voice coming from the speakers.
Sam says stop, and Dean hits the breaks so hard Sam has to put a hand against the dashboard to brace himself. Sam gets out of the car, slams the door, and Dean wants to hit him, wants to stop him, wants Sam back instead of the man obsessed with an insane cause that resembles his father so very much.
By the time he gets out of the car himself, Sam is getting his stuff out of the trunk, muttering to himself. “What the fuck,” Dean says, sounding more scared than angry, and they’re at it all over again. Sam shoves Dean, Dean shoves back, Sam punches him on the jaw and Dean gives him a black eye.
In the end, Sam walks away, the pavement cracking under his feet, and it feels too much like those first months together, right before the entire mess with Meg and her psychotic demon father started.
This time, Sam doesn’t call to say he’s sorry. He doesn’t call at all, actually.
----
Sam finds the Brotherhood two months after he gets out of the Impala.
It’s tricky business, since he can’t really just ask around for Magneto. Instead, he recovers whatever skill he got as a hacker on his teens, rusty after years of no use, and impersonates seven government agents in various agencies to locate their camp. Then he has to go through their defenses, and through their guards, and through their traps. When he finally stands in front of Magneto, he’s limping, and dizzy with so much blood loss. Magneto smiles at him, at his bloody hands, and claims to know all about him.
“That was quite a lot of incentive you showed, my boy,” he says, before grabbing Sam’s chin and forcing him to look backwards, at the trail of destruction he left in his wake. It makes Sam shiver a bit, watching the destroyed machinery, the torn down electric wiring that make sparks fly everywhere and the bleeding people. He wants to forget and knows that he won’t. “I do like that on a person.”
Sam swallows hard, steels himself and says the words he’s been planning to say for months. “I want to join you. I believe - I believe it is the only way for mutants to live in this world.”
Magneto keeps smiling. “You can stay. We could use someone like you around here.”
----
Dean doesn’t find the X-Men. They don’t find him, either - they find what he’s after, rather.
It’s a ghost, a simple salt and burn, a girl that after a hundred years is still looking for the wedding ring she lost just before she died. The job’s tougher now that Sam isn’t on board, but it’s nothing Dean can’t handle. The stairs of the abandoned house creak, almost too ominously, too very cliché, and the spiderwebs get tangled on his hair.
He doesn’t really count on the ghost almost killing the girl that owns the ring now, along with her small child and husband, or on the pair of glorified super-heroes that show up and mess up everything.
He’s never been shy about using his powers in gigs, not when it’s just another way of coming home (motel sweet motel) alive afterwards, but for once the force field he puts around the family don’t get as much attention as the ghost disappearing into a cloud of dust after he shoots it does.
“What was that?” the girl asks. She looks about twelve and is wearing black and pink leather. Dean wonders about the state of youth these days. The guy behind her, the one that has Russian mafia spelled all over him, is just gaping, eyes and mouth wide open. He would look like an idiot, only his entire skin is made of steel, which gives him somewhat of a free pass in Dean’s eyes.
“Haven’t you ever seen a ghost, kid?” he asks, all nonchalance because he hardly ever gets to brag, and the girl frowns.
“I’m not a kid, thank you very much.” She turns around to see if the people huddled by the wall are all right, helps them stand up. They look fairly shell shocked, but they seem to be decent folk - they don’t pull away from them, at least. Once she seems to be confident they’re okay, she looks at him again. “That was pretty awesome, though,” she says, and Dean grins.
Later, once they’ve burnt the girl’s bones, along with her ring, the guy asks approximately a bazillion questions. They were looking for a rogue mutant, and they discovered ghosts are real instead, so Dean can’t really blame them for being a bit intrigued. They tell him about Xavier’s school in return, about their mission and what they’re trying to accomplish. It sounds like quite a tall order for guys wearing leather and playing Superman, but something tells Dean they can be trusted, and that they’re honest.
It’s been a long while since he’s met honest people.
“Nothing is going to solve itself, you know,” the girl, Kitty, says. “We have to do what we can if we want peace.” Their idealism reminds him somewhat of Sam, of his hopes of making the world a better place for mutants, but there’s a certain realism to what they’re trying to achieve, and at least they’re doing it the right way. They’re also lacking the feverish, furious look in the eyes of everyone he’s seen from the Brotherhood on TV, the same one Sam would get from time to time. The one that would scare him.
“Why don’t you come and see for yourself?” Steel-boy says. He introduced himself as Piotr, but that’s not nearly as amusing. “You don’t have to sign up for anything, just see if the place suits you. Any help is appreciated, anyway.”
“I don’t know. I think this whole fight among the races, or whatever, is pure bullshit, and that both sides are acting their worst. And at the same time, being fucking Geneva is getting really awkward.”
Steel-boy shrugs. “Like I said, we’re not making you do anything. But we could use someone like you around the mansion.”
----
Being with the Brotherhood is like being at constant war. There’s a certain paranoia that comes with the job, and something as simple as breaking camp or shaving in the morning can turn into a brawl, or an accusation of spying for the other side. Who exactly is the other side, Sam isn’t sure about - Magneto seems to think everyone who isn’t with him is against him, and the ideology carries into his make-shift troops.
Pretty much everyone takes an instant dislike to him. Some of the people there have been trying to get Magneto’s attention for years, and Sam did it in his very first day. He’s supposedly with allies, but he learns not to go anywhere without a knife, and it keeps his powers sharp.
Magneto wants to know all about the occult. Demons, Necromancy - he keeps asking about it, over and over, with the same look he gets whenever he counts his assets on this war he’s waging against the human race. “Just imagine the possibilities,” he says, and Sam won’t admit it, but his blood runs cold.
Dean once told him his belief in Magneto bordered on fanatical. Sam doesn’t like admitting it to himself, but he knows Dean was somewhat right. Even so, the fact stands that he doesn’t tell Magneto how to summon demons. He doesn’t really like thinking why.
One of the first missions he goes on involves tearing down a bank’s vault, while Magneto holds the guards hostage with their own guns. As he fills a canvas bag with more money than he has ever seen in his life, jaw tense under his black mask, he says, “I thought we were doing this to help mutant-kind.”
Magneto smirks. “We are, my boy. But one cannot save the world without enough funds. Remember that,” he says, and the childish part of Sam that wants to believe in fairy tales dies that day.
He believes in the cause, believes in getting freedom for his species, but being with the Brotherhood makes him jumpy, makes him paranoid, makes him suspicious of everyone and everything. He feels like a pawn, playing by arbitrary rules Magneto changes at will.
He always felt like too much of a mutant while growing up, never like the normal kids, and now, in the midst of his kind, surrounded by outcasts and social pariahs, his fancy Ivy League education and memory of a family that always accepted him makes him feels like too much of a human.
----
Xavier’s Institute for Gifted Youngsters has quite a staff shortage, so Dean gets roped into a teaching position almost immediately. He teaches Folklore and Engeneering, and the fancy words for his every day knowledge amuse him. Still, the kids love messing around with cars, and they seem to take his Folklore class as an excuse to tell spooky stories.
It’s amazing how a bunch of kids that can fly or read minds or have spikes covering their bodies can laugh at the idea of an angry spirit. Dean takes them on a hunt, one of those amateur haunting jobs he’d usually never bother taking, and that shuts them up. From then on, he’s practically idolized around the mansion.
Ororo, the apparently self-appointed headmistress, gives him a twenty minute lecture on the wrongs of risking the children. Dean mentions the Danger Room and calls her a hypocrite. She nearly fires him.
Kitty turns out to not be twelve after all. Dean still doesn’t make a pass at her, thanks to a lifetime of avoiding minors. She might not be jailbait, but she sure looks it, and Dean has been run out of towns enough times to have learnt his lesson.
He once touches Rogue on the shoulder by accident, and wakes up twelve hours later in the infirmary. She apologizes, far too many times, actually, and watching her wring her gloved hands together and biting her lip makes him want to hug the kid, tell her it’ll be all right. Most of the other kids avoid her, see her as a traitor for having once taken the cure, but Dean can’t blame her. He can only imagine how lonely she must feel.
He sometimes comes with on missions. It’s enough like a hunt that he sort of likes them - the rush, the adrenaline, the satisfaction of helping people. He’s not used to the enemy being other human beings, though, homo sapiens and mutant alike, instead of dead things, and it throws him off balance, makes him hesitate.
Dean likes the place, though. Likes the kids with their idiosyncrasies and curious faces, likes drinking cheap beer with Logan and telling stories of the many girls they’ve known and having burping contests, likes teaching. Likes having a purpose, having people to protect again.
----
Dean refuses to wear those fucking stupid uniforms.
----
Sam asks whether a uniform would be a good idea, to bring them all together.
----
Sam takes to this asshole of a guy, Pyro, bleached hair and wide grin and a rebel to the core. He wears leather and listens to dead rock. He’s a couple of years younger than Sam, but already higher in the food chain and with a certain look in his eyes that’s far too old for his face. “Fuck ‘em, whatever they think, man, it shouldn’t matter to you,” he says all the time, and he says it with complete conviction.
Sam likes him because he reminds him of Dean.
----
Dean takes to this geek, Bobby, wide eyes and perpetual frown and the quintessential good guy. He wears sweaters and reads far more than what’s good for him. There’s something broken about him, something that he avoids talking about so deliberately that it ends up being ever present. Dean likes fixing things. Bobby looks far younger than his actual age, and far more innocent than he actually is, even when dressed in leather and readying for battle. It looks sort of wrong, that a kid his age might be asked to risk his life for the cause. Bobby says that it’s worth it.
Dean likes him because he reminds him of Sam.
----
“Magneto is building something,” Pyro says while they eat side by side outside Sam’s tent. It looks like rain, and the food sucks, so Sam has been mostly sucking on his spoon and looking at the sky for the last fifteen minutes.
“How do you know?”
Pyro rolls his eyes. “I know you’ve only been here for a couple of months, but shit, man, you could at least try paying attention to the stuff going on around you.”
Sam kicks him lightly on the shin. “Enlighten me, then, you asshole.”
“Forge has been trailing after him for a week already. There have been funny noises and explosions coming out of Magneto’s tent for the same amount of time. And the last group of scouts that went out came back with a bunch of those musty old books with all that magic crap you told him about. You join the dots, genius.”
Sam’s only met Forge a couple of times, but they’re enough to know just how good he is at developing machinery. Add that to Magneto’s ever rising interest in the occult, and Sam is worried.
“We should probably check that out.”
“No shit.” Pyro might be a firm believer, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to rebel - from everything, it seems - every once in a while.
So they drag themselves through the mud and use military signs and behave like children all over again, enjoying every minute of it. Then they take a look at what Magneto is doing, and suddenly it’s not so funny anymore.
----
“There’s something you need to know.”
All four participants in the supposed ‘staff meeting’ turn to look at Bobby, looking pale in the doorway. Rogue is right behind him, arms crossed and a frown on her face.
“Magneto’s planning something. Something big,’ Bobby says, looking grave.
“No offense, Bobby,” Ororo says, talking the way she would do to a child, not an equal teammate. Dean’s always found it too patronizing. “But how on earth would you know?”
“John just called me, sounded relatively freaked out for--”
Ororo interrupts. “Wait - you’re still in contact with Pyro?”
Bobby glares at her, and Rogue beside him does too. “His name is John. And no, I wasn’t. Not until now.”
“Sorry to say it, kid,” Logan says, his feet on top of Ororo’s desk, “But it has trap written all over it.” Hank doesn't say anything, but he’s always ready to give anyone the benefit of doubt.
“Look, I know John, all right? And I know how much he believes in Magneto. And how much he resents the X-Men. Trust me, he sounded like he’d rather kill himself than make the call. If it wasn’t something really, really bad, he certainly wouldn’t have made it.” Bobby makes it sound pompous, he tends to do it every time, but pompous suits Bobby, and it doesn’t make it any less true.
Ororo actually pats Bobby on the shoulder. “Bobby, I know how much you want your best friend back, but--”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake stop treating him like a child already,” Rogue says, white with fury, and gains Dean’s respect.
Half an hour later, Ororo decides to wait and see how things go. An hour later, Rogue and Bobby steal the jet. Dean goes along, if only because someone has to keep them from getting in trouble.
And also because dude, stealing a jet. He certainly isn’t missing that.
They’re too late.
By the time they reach the camp Bobby’s friend told him about, most of the Brotherhood is trying to escape, leaving everything behind as the machine smack in the middle of the camp glows brighter. Magneto is standing by it, smiling softly at it, arms outstretched, and from the look of it, it’s finally happened, he’s gone completely insane, and not even his subordinates can deny it anymore.
“Jesus,” Dean says to himself, lightly. There are runes on the machine; powerful, destructive signs, stuff Magneto doesn’t have any right to be messing with. No one can reach him, not without falling dead on the spot. Dean doesn’t even try and then forgets all about it when he sees Sam’s dirt-stricken, terrified face among the running crowd.
“Sam!” he shouts, and starts running toward him, forgetting he’s supposed to stick close to Bobby and Rogue.
“Get out of here, Dean, it’s going to explode!” Sam yells above the crowd, and Dean can barely hear him, doesn’t really register it because it’s such a relief, finally seeing him after all these months.
Then the earth starts moving, and Magneto smiles beatifically at the sky, enraptured. Dean reaches Sam, throws him to the ground and forms the strongest, largest force field he’s ever created in his life.
The world goes white.
----
Sam isn’t sure what Magneto does. He doesn’t know the how, and he can’t even start imagining the why. He just knows that the earth shakes and everything goes white and that the world as he knows it comes to an end.
Part 2
Seriously, I had a great time writing this, and this is truly one of the most entertaining ficathons ever. :DDD
Title: Migratory Birds
Word Count: 11,426
Fandom: Supernatural/X-Men Movieverse crossover
Summary: When the end comes, one brother is on one side, and the other on the opposite.
Author Notes: Betaed by the awesome mellafe and amchara, written for kellifer_fic in the occasion of apocalyptothon. Sort of AU-ish for SPN, post X-3 for X-Men.
I was going to do upload some end-of-days themed songs, but Muxtape decided to get in trouble with the RIAA right this day, lol.
Sam’s powers manifest when he’s ten, when he tears half the house down.
----
Their lives are weird enough that something as small as Sam being able to destroy everything he touches hardly makes a blip in their radar for the longest time. The word Mutant starts popping up in the newspapers, though, and Sam once gets beaten for shredding a notebook by mistake. Dean teaches him some moves, and the next day, Sam gets expelled for giving the offender a bloody nose and a black eye. He chants It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, in his tiny, broken voice for a day straight, and Dean goes white-knuckled with indignation. He pats Sam on the head, tells him everything will be all right and that the town sucked, anyway, and then he goes and breaks into the principal’s house and writes ‘Asshole’ on his bedroom wall in neon green paint.
Sam’s a smart kid. He learns to make people see him the way he wants them to.
He spends most of his teenage years trying to be as normal as possible, all polo shirts and big smile and perfect grades, fitting in everywhere he goes. Dean, who wears ratty Metallica shirts and bangs the entire cheerleading squad under the bleachers and organizes burping contests in the cafeteria doesn’t get it, finds the idea of being just like everyone else absurd. Then he catches Sam using his powers in secret, hands against a rusty pot that crumples onto itself, and sees the look on Sam’s face, both exhilarated and appalled at his own taste for destruction. He stops leaving the half-sarcastic, half-truthful notes on his pillow or school books saying Be yourself, Sammy, you’re a beautiful butterfly as you are! surrounded by pink hearts. The little bitch didn’t appreciate his tender brotherly gestures, anyway.
Sam’s powers are an incredible help on hunts. Or whenever they can’t find the can opener. Dean encourages him to use them, goes as far as inventing excuses in which he may need them, because he figures they’re a part of Sam, just like a kidney or something like that, and he might need them for living, whether Sam likes it or not. With a little training, Sam’s powers actually evolve, become strong enough that he doesn’t even have to be in contact with whatever he wants to destroy. Dean actually swaggers the day after the breakthrough, smugly takes all the credit and Sam calls him a fucking idiot, laughing.
For the most part, he just wishes Sam didn’t have to be so alone.
---
Dean manifests when he’s nineteen, almost on the verge of turning out to be human after all, and the look on his father’s eyes, the pained one, has him silent and withdrawn for a couple of days. He says he likes it, though, having another way of being able to keep his family safe.
Sam likes it too, secretly, mostly because it means that he’s not alone anymore.
----
The only time their father ever mentions Sam’s mutation is when Sam announces he’s going to Stanford. And to think I still raised you, even knowing what you are, he says, and everything goes silent and Sam opens his eyes very wide and Dean wants to yell, wants to hit something, preferably his father, because of all the things he could have said to make Sam leave them forever, that was the worst.
Sam leaves, and their father regrets those words for the rest of his life, because Dean knows he never meant them, that he was just too scared of having his boy walk out on him, alone and unprotected.
He tells Sam, later, how Dad would start apologizing every time he drank too much, or every time something got too close and he ended up bleeding everywhere, but he’s not sure Sam ever believes him.
----
Jess is a sweet girl, but she’s also a smart one, and she thinks long and hard before deciding whether she wants to stay with Sam after she finds out about him being a mutant by accident.
She stays, and then she dies, and it makes it even more painful, knowing that she was the one girl with whom Sam knew he could be completely himself with. Everything after her death is a blur - Stanford, classes, her blood on his forehead as she died above him on the ceiling, covered in fire. There is only the road and the Impala beneath him and Dean treading carefully around him and their father, ever-present even when missing.
Their first hunt together after Jess’s funeral, he rips the Wendigo open from the inside out, doesn’t even blink, and Dean watches him, face sprayed with blood, with something akin to fear.
Sam shrugs it off, and doesn’t much care.
----
After Stanford, Sam starts using his powers almost openly.
“What the hell, dude,” Dean says after Sam rips the lock off their jammed motel room door instead of kicking it open. “I thought you were all about secrecy and subtlety and all of those other annoying esses,” he says, surprised. Then again, everything about this new Sam, taciturn and angry, surprises him these days.
Sam shrugs. “I’m done hiding who I am. It’s not like I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Well that’s all very good, but it won’t stop people from being, you know, people. In case you haven’t noticed, being a mutant isn’t exactly hot for the season.”
“I tried normal once, Dean. It didn’t work out so well.”
Dean knows that look, the one he gets whenever he thinks of Jess, so he doesn’t push it.
----
The government starts talking of Sentinels in 2006. That’s when things start going wrong between them.
----
They watch the manifestations and speeches and riots on TV in between jobs. Dean always keeps his finger on the channel button, as if wanting to reassure himself that he can stop himself from watching, from knowing, but he never does press it.
It’s an anti-mutant rally this time, mourning for a teenager that was killed by a young mutant, a kid no older than ten. The crying people being interviewed don’t mention the fact that the kid had almost been stoned to death, and that he’d lashed out in self-defense. They always seem to forget details like that, people on TV. They’re burning human-sized dolls with blue sprayed skin. There’s signs saying death to the muties hanging from their necks.
Humans. They do like getting their point across.
They’re sitting cross-legged on Sam’s bed, shoes off but socks on, sharing a pizza. There’s a grease-stain on the cheap coverlet from where a piece of pepperoni fell on it.
“God, this is horrible,” Sam says, grimacing, and Dean takes a swig from his beer instead of stating the obvious.
Sam stares at him with a look of pure disgust. “Doesn’t it bother you at all, Dean? This is your race they’re attacking,” he says, lips curled, and it sometimes scares Dean a bit, Sam’s intensity.
“Fuck that race shit, we’re all human beings, Sam,” Dean says, angry himself. “I’m not about to lower myself to their level, that’s all.”
Sam snorts. The image cuts to the kid, Brian Emery, age ten, wearing orange overalls and sitting in the corner of a prison cell, shaking and trying not to look at the camera. He’ll be tried like an adult. It makes Dean feel sick to his stomach.
“Someone should put a stop to this,” Sam says, flustered and breathing hard with indignation. “Someone should make this right.”
“Who? That psycho Magneto and his jolly band of brainwashed followers? They only make things worse.”
“Yes. Maybe. Magneto - he could make this right.”
The way he says it, completely convinced, makes Dean shiver. Sam does nothing by halves. “Please tell me you don’t buy his crap, Sam. Please.”
Sam shakes his head. “We’re not human, Dean. And watching this, I don’t think I want to be.”
----
A Black Dog in Idaho and Sam feels raw, weary. The creature is too powerful and too filled with magic for his powers to be any good, and they only seem to make it angrier. It comes at him, roaring, drizzling saliva from in between yellow fangs. He aims for its liver, feels it shred and tear as his hand mimics claws, but then the thing is on him and he releases his hold with a grunt of surprise. Sharp teeth sink on his arm and he cries out, feels warm blood seeping out under his sleeve.
Dean shoots the thing on the head, and it whines, far too much like a dog, before turning on him. Sam pants, throws his head down on the ground for a moment and breathes, tries to clear his head. He’s running on adrenaline and fear and not much else. The victim of the week, a middle-aged salesman, is cowering by the corner, scratching at the plaster. Sam rises and goes to him, knowing that Dean can handle the skinwalker for a moment - unless he’s injured, nothing can’t get past his force field, and it’s a relief, at least, especially knowing how much Dean likes putting himself at risk.
The man cringes away when Sam offers him his hand. “Don’t touch me, you freak!” he shrieks, high-pitched, and Sam starts shaking with fury, every muscle tense and teeth grinding.
“I’m trying to help you, you bigoted moron.” He ends up having to knock him unconscious when the guy keeps on crawling away from him, yelling at Sam to get away. He throws him outside the house with rather more force than necessary, but doesn’t feel especially apologetic.
The creature burns, but Sam feels nothing of the usual post-hunt high.
When they go out the man is still unconscious, lying still on the grass, limbs akimbo, in the exact place Sam left him. “So he preferred the blood-thirsty beast to the mutant that was trying to save his ass? Man, that’s messed up,” Dean says, digging his boot into the guy’s kidneys. His lip is curled, but he doesn’t mean much by it, just that this particular guy is an asshole and it’s a shame and that’s it.
Sam, Sam doesn’t see it that way. He’s tired of being feared more than the things he kills to keep assholes like this one safe.
He vows to make it stop.
----
They fight just outside of Minneapolis, after ten hours of driving. They’ve taken the art of bickering to a whole new level in the years since Sam got back from Stanford, but this is new. There’s a real bite to the accusations, to the insults, and they’re both aiming to hurt the other one as much as they can.
It starts about the usual subjects; their messed up life growing up, their father’s never ending stubbornness, his readiness to risk his sons for his vengeance. Then it escalates until it’s about Your fucking blind belief in this stupid megalomaniac wearing a cape and a funny helmet, and Your ridiculous pacifist views. At least I’m not afraid of making a stand, Dean, and I’m taking my species’ side.
They shout hard enough to drown out Robert Plant’s voice coming from the speakers.
Sam says stop, and Dean hits the breaks so hard Sam has to put a hand against the dashboard to brace himself. Sam gets out of the car, slams the door, and Dean wants to hit him, wants to stop him, wants Sam back instead of the man obsessed with an insane cause that resembles his father so very much.
By the time he gets out of the car himself, Sam is getting his stuff out of the trunk, muttering to himself. “What the fuck,” Dean says, sounding more scared than angry, and they’re at it all over again. Sam shoves Dean, Dean shoves back, Sam punches him on the jaw and Dean gives him a black eye.
In the end, Sam walks away, the pavement cracking under his feet, and it feels too much like those first months together, right before the entire mess with Meg and her psychotic demon father started.
This time, Sam doesn’t call to say he’s sorry. He doesn’t call at all, actually.
----
Sam finds the Brotherhood two months after he gets out of the Impala.
It’s tricky business, since he can’t really just ask around for Magneto. Instead, he recovers whatever skill he got as a hacker on his teens, rusty after years of no use, and impersonates seven government agents in various agencies to locate their camp. Then he has to go through their defenses, and through their guards, and through their traps. When he finally stands in front of Magneto, he’s limping, and dizzy with so much blood loss. Magneto smiles at him, at his bloody hands, and claims to know all about him.
“That was quite a lot of incentive you showed, my boy,” he says, before grabbing Sam’s chin and forcing him to look backwards, at the trail of destruction he left in his wake. It makes Sam shiver a bit, watching the destroyed machinery, the torn down electric wiring that make sparks fly everywhere and the bleeding people. He wants to forget and knows that he won’t. “I do like that on a person.”
Sam swallows hard, steels himself and says the words he’s been planning to say for months. “I want to join you. I believe - I believe it is the only way for mutants to live in this world.”
Magneto keeps smiling. “You can stay. We could use someone like you around here.”
----
Dean doesn’t find the X-Men. They don’t find him, either - they find what he’s after, rather.
It’s a ghost, a simple salt and burn, a girl that after a hundred years is still looking for the wedding ring she lost just before she died. The job’s tougher now that Sam isn’t on board, but it’s nothing Dean can’t handle. The stairs of the abandoned house creak, almost too ominously, too very cliché, and the spiderwebs get tangled on his hair.
He doesn’t really count on the ghost almost killing the girl that owns the ring now, along with her small child and husband, or on the pair of glorified super-heroes that show up and mess up everything.
He’s never been shy about using his powers in gigs, not when it’s just another way of coming home (motel sweet motel) alive afterwards, but for once the force field he puts around the family don’t get as much attention as the ghost disappearing into a cloud of dust after he shoots it does.
“What was that?” the girl asks. She looks about twelve and is wearing black and pink leather. Dean wonders about the state of youth these days. The guy behind her, the one that has Russian mafia spelled all over him, is just gaping, eyes and mouth wide open. He would look like an idiot, only his entire skin is made of steel, which gives him somewhat of a free pass in Dean’s eyes.
“Haven’t you ever seen a ghost, kid?” he asks, all nonchalance because he hardly ever gets to brag, and the girl frowns.
“I’m not a kid, thank you very much.” She turns around to see if the people huddled by the wall are all right, helps them stand up. They look fairly shell shocked, but they seem to be decent folk - they don’t pull away from them, at least. Once she seems to be confident they’re okay, she looks at him again. “That was pretty awesome, though,” she says, and Dean grins.
Later, once they’ve burnt the girl’s bones, along with her ring, the guy asks approximately a bazillion questions. They were looking for a rogue mutant, and they discovered ghosts are real instead, so Dean can’t really blame them for being a bit intrigued. They tell him about Xavier’s school in return, about their mission and what they’re trying to accomplish. It sounds like quite a tall order for guys wearing leather and playing Superman, but something tells Dean they can be trusted, and that they’re honest.
It’s been a long while since he’s met honest people.
“Nothing is going to solve itself, you know,” the girl, Kitty, says. “We have to do what we can if we want peace.” Their idealism reminds him somewhat of Sam, of his hopes of making the world a better place for mutants, but there’s a certain realism to what they’re trying to achieve, and at least they’re doing it the right way. They’re also lacking the feverish, furious look in the eyes of everyone he’s seen from the Brotherhood on TV, the same one Sam would get from time to time. The one that would scare him.
“Why don’t you come and see for yourself?” Steel-boy says. He introduced himself as Piotr, but that’s not nearly as amusing. “You don’t have to sign up for anything, just see if the place suits you. Any help is appreciated, anyway.”
“I don’t know. I think this whole fight among the races, or whatever, is pure bullshit, and that both sides are acting their worst. And at the same time, being fucking Geneva is getting really awkward.”
Steel-boy shrugs. “Like I said, we’re not making you do anything. But we could use someone like you around the mansion.”
----
Being with the Brotherhood is like being at constant war. There’s a certain paranoia that comes with the job, and something as simple as breaking camp or shaving in the morning can turn into a brawl, or an accusation of spying for the other side. Who exactly is the other side, Sam isn’t sure about - Magneto seems to think everyone who isn’t with him is against him, and the ideology carries into his make-shift troops.
Pretty much everyone takes an instant dislike to him. Some of the people there have been trying to get Magneto’s attention for years, and Sam did it in his very first day. He’s supposedly with allies, but he learns not to go anywhere without a knife, and it keeps his powers sharp.
Magneto wants to know all about the occult. Demons, Necromancy - he keeps asking about it, over and over, with the same look he gets whenever he counts his assets on this war he’s waging against the human race. “Just imagine the possibilities,” he says, and Sam won’t admit it, but his blood runs cold.
Dean once told him his belief in Magneto bordered on fanatical. Sam doesn’t like admitting it to himself, but he knows Dean was somewhat right. Even so, the fact stands that he doesn’t tell Magneto how to summon demons. He doesn’t really like thinking why.
One of the first missions he goes on involves tearing down a bank’s vault, while Magneto holds the guards hostage with their own guns. As he fills a canvas bag with more money than he has ever seen in his life, jaw tense under his black mask, he says, “I thought we were doing this to help mutant-kind.”
Magneto smirks. “We are, my boy. But one cannot save the world without enough funds. Remember that,” he says, and the childish part of Sam that wants to believe in fairy tales dies that day.
He believes in the cause, believes in getting freedom for his species, but being with the Brotherhood makes him jumpy, makes him paranoid, makes him suspicious of everyone and everything. He feels like a pawn, playing by arbitrary rules Magneto changes at will.
He always felt like too much of a mutant while growing up, never like the normal kids, and now, in the midst of his kind, surrounded by outcasts and social pariahs, his fancy Ivy League education and memory of a family that always accepted him makes him feels like too much of a human.
----
Xavier’s Institute for Gifted Youngsters has quite a staff shortage, so Dean gets roped into a teaching position almost immediately. He teaches Folklore and Engeneering, and the fancy words for his every day knowledge amuse him. Still, the kids love messing around with cars, and they seem to take his Folklore class as an excuse to tell spooky stories.
It’s amazing how a bunch of kids that can fly or read minds or have spikes covering their bodies can laugh at the idea of an angry spirit. Dean takes them on a hunt, one of those amateur haunting jobs he’d usually never bother taking, and that shuts them up. From then on, he’s practically idolized around the mansion.
Ororo, the apparently self-appointed headmistress, gives him a twenty minute lecture on the wrongs of risking the children. Dean mentions the Danger Room and calls her a hypocrite. She nearly fires him.
Kitty turns out to not be twelve after all. Dean still doesn’t make a pass at her, thanks to a lifetime of avoiding minors. She might not be jailbait, but she sure looks it, and Dean has been run out of towns enough times to have learnt his lesson.
He once touches Rogue on the shoulder by accident, and wakes up twelve hours later in the infirmary. She apologizes, far too many times, actually, and watching her wring her gloved hands together and biting her lip makes him want to hug the kid, tell her it’ll be all right. Most of the other kids avoid her, see her as a traitor for having once taken the cure, but Dean can’t blame her. He can only imagine how lonely she must feel.
He sometimes comes with on missions. It’s enough like a hunt that he sort of likes them - the rush, the adrenaline, the satisfaction of helping people. He’s not used to the enemy being other human beings, though, homo sapiens and mutant alike, instead of dead things, and it throws him off balance, makes him hesitate.
Dean likes the place, though. Likes the kids with their idiosyncrasies and curious faces, likes drinking cheap beer with Logan and telling stories of the many girls they’ve known and having burping contests, likes teaching. Likes having a purpose, having people to protect again.
----
Dean refuses to wear those fucking stupid uniforms.
----
Sam asks whether a uniform would be a good idea, to bring them all together.
----
Sam takes to this asshole of a guy, Pyro, bleached hair and wide grin and a rebel to the core. He wears leather and listens to dead rock. He’s a couple of years younger than Sam, but already higher in the food chain and with a certain look in his eyes that’s far too old for his face. “Fuck ‘em, whatever they think, man, it shouldn’t matter to you,” he says all the time, and he says it with complete conviction.
Sam likes him because he reminds him of Dean.
----
Dean takes to this geek, Bobby, wide eyes and perpetual frown and the quintessential good guy. He wears sweaters and reads far more than what’s good for him. There’s something broken about him, something that he avoids talking about so deliberately that it ends up being ever present. Dean likes fixing things. Bobby looks far younger than his actual age, and far more innocent than he actually is, even when dressed in leather and readying for battle. It looks sort of wrong, that a kid his age might be asked to risk his life for the cause. Bobby says that it’s worth it.
Dean likes him because he reminds him of Sam.
----
“Magneto is building something,” Pyro says while they eat side by side outside Sam’s tent. It looks like rain, and the food sucks, so Sam has been mostly sucking on his spoon and looking at the sky for the last fifteen minutes.
“How do you know?”
Pyro rolls his eyes. “I know you’ve only been here for a couple of months, but shit, man, you could at least try paying attention to the stuff going on around you.”
Sam kicks him lightly on the shin. “Enlighten me, then, you asshole.”
“Forge has been trailing after him for a week already. There have been funny noises and explosions coming out of Magneto’s tent for the same amount of time. And the last group of scouts that went out came back with a bunch of those musty old books with all that magic crap you told him about. You join the dots, genius.”
Sam’s only met Forge a couple of times, but they’re enough to know just how good he is at developing machinery. Add that to Magneto’s ever rising interest in the occult, and Sam is worried.
“We should probably check that out.”
“No shit.” Pyro might be a firm believer, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to rebel - from everything, it seems - every once in a while.
So they drag themselves through the mud and use military signs and behave like children all over again, enjoying every minute of it. Then they take a look at what Magneto is doing, and suddenly it’s not so funny anymore.
----
“There’s something you need to know.”
All four participants in the supposed ‘staff meeting’ turn to look at Bobby, looking pale in the doorway. Rogue is right behind him, arms crossed and a frown on her face.
“Magneto’s planning something. Something big,’ Bobby says, looking grave.
“No offense, Bobby,” Ororo says, talking the way she would do to a child, not an equal teammate. Dean’s always found it too patronizing. “But how on earth would you know?”
“John just called me, sounded relatively freaked out for--”
Ororo interrupts. “Wait - you’re still in contact with Pyro?”
Bobby glares at her, and Rogue beside him does too. “His name is John. And no, I wasn’t. Not until now.”
“Sorry to say it, kid,” Logan says, his feet on top of Ororo’s desk, “But it has trap written all over it.” Hank doesn't say anything, but he’s always ready to give anyone the benefit of doubt.
“Look, I know John, all right? And I know how much he believes in Magneto. And how much he resents the X-Men. Trust me, he sounded like he’d rather kill himself than make the call. If it wasn’t something really, really bad, he certainly wouldn’t have made it.” Bobby makes it sound pompous, he tends to do it every time, but pompous suits Bobby, and it doesn’t make it any less true.
Ororo actually pats Bobby on the shoulder. “Bobby, I know how much you want your best friend back, but--”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake stop treating him like a child already,” Rogue says, white with fury, and gains Dean’s respect.
Half an hour later, Ororo decides to wait and see how things go. An hour later, Rogue and Bobby steal the jet. Dean goes along, if only because someone has to keep them from getting in trouble.
And also because dude, stealing a jet. He certainly isn’t missing that.
They’re too late.
By the time they reach the camp Bobby’s friend told him about, most of the Brotherhood is trying to escape, leaving everything behind as the machine smack in the middle of the camp glows brighter. Magneto is standing by it, smiling softly at it, arms outstretched, and from the look of it, it’s finally happened, he’s gone completely insane, and not even his subordinates can deny it anymore.
“Jesus,” Dean says to himself, lightly. There are runes on the machine; powerful, destructive signs, stuff Magneto doesn’t have any right to be messing with. No one can reach him, not without falling dead on the spot. Dean doesn’t even try and then forgets all about it when he sees Sam’s dirt-stricken, terrified face among the running crowd.
“Sam!” he shouts, and starts running toward him, forgetting he’s supposed to stick close to Bobby and Rogue.
“Get out of here, Dean, it’s going to explode!” Sam yells above the crowd, and Dean can barely hear him, doesn’t really register it because it’s such a relief, finally seeing him after all these months.
Then the earth starts moving, and Magneto smiles beatifically at the sky, enraptured. Dean reaches Sam, throws him to the ground and forms the strongest, largest force field he’s ever created in his life.
The world goes white.
----
Sam isn’t sure what Magneto does. He doesn’t know the how, and he can’t even start imagining the why. He just knows that the earth shakes and everything goes white and that the world as he knows it comes to an end.
Part 2