Fic: People Are Strange (5/6)
Fic: People Are Strange (5/6)
Series: Special Projects
Summary: Dean and Chloe head to Houston to help out an old friend while Sam and Sarah do their own sleuthing.
Author: pen37
Beta: Strangevisitor7 and Clarksmuse
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean, Sarah
Pairing:Chloe/Dean Sam/Sarah
Rating: pg-13
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Chloe and Dean crowded into an interrogation room so that they could discuss the supernatural aspects of the case without the rest of the homicide department overhearing. While she took a seat, Dean paced like a caged lion behind her chair.
He'd been in rooms like this a few times in his life. The memories weren't exactly good ones. Across the desk from Chloe, Mac looked over the literature she'd put together on Aztec ritual and sacrifice.
Finally, he looked up at her with a troubled expression.
“Your brother is sure that it's Aztec?”
“You callin’ my brother a liar?” Dean snarled.
“Just . . . hoping he's wrong.” Mac sighed. “Mesoamerican rites were bloody. I was hoping this wasn't going to get messy.”
“Yeah, I got that with the first six murders,” Dean muttered.
“It'll get worse unless we stop it,” Chloe said as she shuffled papers. “Blood sacrifice was part of every devotion in the Mesoamerican religions. They thought that the gods preserved the earth and stopped the apocalypse through their own blood, sacrifice and death. So even at home, families would pierce their ears and fingertips with thorns, and then anoint the household gods with blood.”
“Why?” Dean finally grabbed the spare chair, turned it backwards and straddled it. Then he leaned on the back and gave Chloe an incredulous look.
“The basic tenant of belief was that the gods were only generous to humans if they were nurtured by humans - and their nourishment of choice was blood.”
“You get demons, but people are crazy?” Mac scoffed. “We get blood cults when demons take an already bloody religion like that and set up shop. We're dealing with demons here. Demons who are taking advantage of the darkest that humanity has to offer.”
“Which means we need to make sure we put 'em down. Fast,” Dean said.
“So what are we looking for?” Mac tilted his head at Chloe.
“According to these notes,” she shuffled through the information that Sam had sent. “We've just come out of the devotions to hasten the end to drought. So the next set of devotions in the cycle would focus on the Xipe Totec, the fertility god.”
Dean looked down and cleared his throat. “Let me guess, it's all about the birds and the bees, so a man and a woman were sacrificed to make the crops grow.”
“Not exactly,” Chloe shook her head. The staple crop in Latin America was maize. And maze has a husk.”
“You mean they . . .” Dean's face twisted in a grimace as he realized where Chloe was going with this.
“The festival was called the flaying of men,” Chloe said.
“Has a nice ring to it.” Dean's nose turned up in disgust.
“The victims were usually warriors,” Chloe said as she turned to look at Mac. “And they were killed gladiator style before being flayed, so if I were you, I would look for missing persons reports of guys who kept themselves in shape. Maybe martial arts instructors, former military, that sort of thing.”
Mac nodded as he scribbled down the notes. “I'll get this over to Missing Persons and see what they come up with.”
Once he left, Dean looked at Chloe speculatively. “If we don't get them during this cycle, what's next?”
“The big one is the sacrifice of Tezcatilpoca. It's --Remember the cult we took out last Christmas?”
“The cultists were going to kill some poor jerk as a stand-in king,” Dean said.
“This is exactly like that. Except that the victim represented is the living embodiment of the major god of the pantheon.”
“They kill their own god?” Dean asked.
“They believed that the gods sacrificed themselves to save the world four times. By symbolically killing him yearly, they actually strengthen him.”
“But no one believes this, right?” Dean raised his eyebrows incredulously. “They all know that it's just a demon with a few parlor tricks, right?”
Chloe shrugged in response. “I don't know, Dean. I can't begin to fathom what's on the mind of folks who would do that in the first place.”
“Great,” Dean muttered. Privately, he wondered how Sam was doing on his own search. When he turned back to Chloe, she was rubbing her temples, a look of exhaustion was etched onto her face.
He felt a pang of guilt at that. Because of the bad memories it was stirring up, the nature of this hunt was personal for her. And he hadn’t exactly made it easier on her with his suspicions about Mac.
We could use a break, he decided. Even a little one. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Chloe looked at him in astonishment. “What, now?”
“Why not?”
“People being flayed alive?” she said.
“Look,” he held his hands out to her. “If we stay here and keep researching this stuff, it’s not going to make much difference. But if we take the afternoon off, we can relax and maybe approach it with a fresh mind.”
Chloe looked uneasy at that. “Mac -“
“Has a whole police station at his say so. He doesn’t need us to dig through missing persons reports.”
She shut her eyes while she considered his words. At length, she sighed, and nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Dean smiled faintly. “Okay, good.” He took her hand and pulled her out of her chair before escorting her to the exit.
* * *
The two of them picked up burgers and drove out to the Channel. Dean parked on an overlook where they could watch tankers and cargo ships sail into and out of port. Then, he crawled up on the hood of the Impala to soak up the late-afternoon sun.
At first, Chloe seemed reluctant to join him. But after he pulled on his shades and lay back against the windshield as if taking a nap, she crawled up next to him. He pulled her against him and settled her between his knees with her back pressing against his chest.
Between their relaxed poses and the warmth of the late-winter Texas sunshine, he felt the tension seem to leach out of her posture. Before long, she leaned back against him and rested her head against his shoulder.
It reminded him of the way he’d held her in Memphis - back when he was starting to realize that what he was feeling for her was more than lust.
At the time she’d been filled with self-loathing over her mutated status. They’d come a long way since then. Somewhere between being entombed in a wall and dragged over the side of an ocean liner, she’d come to accept her healing abilities as useful and important. These days she barely noticed them working, even when she was lit up like a Disney parade float.
Of course, it was thanks to her healing abilities that he had transformed from a vampire to some kind of half-breed super hunter. He supposed after that, it was hard to indulge in self-pity or self-loathing. Particularly unless she wanted to hate him in the process.
“Hmmm,” she hummed contentedly as she turned her face into the sun like a daisy. “This is nice.” Her head lolled back against his shoulder, exposing her pulse point.
He leaned over and suckled on that point before gently nipping at it with his teeth. She shivered under his touch and he felt some long-dormant vestige of the vampire prompt him to wrap his arms around her possessively.
“Sorry we fought,” she whispered.
“Me too.” His breath ghosted across her skin. “But makin’ up is always fun.”
“Dean.” Chloe turned serious eyes on him. “Are you okay with this? Hunting without Sam?” The shadow of guilt clouded her green eyes.
He caressed her face by reply. He knew he could say something trite. Could lie to preserve her feelings. But his gut told him that she would see right through that and wouldn’t appreciate the lie.
“I miss him,” he said with a disarming jerk of his head.
She swallowed convulsively at that, and nodded. “Things are changing,” she said.
“Change - has never been good for this family,” he said. “I don’t like it.”
She ran a comforting hand down the side of his face. “What do you want, Dean?”
He knew what she was asking. She wanted to know his dreams, his hopes. The things he’d never let himself admit to wanting. No one had ever asked him that. Sam probably wondered. Geek Boy had probably even guessed. But he’d never pressed. Because he knew that there was no sense in wanting something that wasn’t going to come true.
But it was different when Chloe asked. Her eyes were soft and tender, but buried way down within them was the kind of unyielding steel that made him think that she would try to help him figure out a way to make all his hopes and dreams come true.
He swallowed at that. The thought was humbling. She was there to look after him in a way that no one ever had before.
“Did I ever tell you about the time a Djinn got the jump on me?”
She raised an eyebrow at that. “A little, I think.”
“I had this perfect world. And I didn’t want to leave it. But - I couldn’t stay. Not if it meant that other people would die while I was happy.”
Her expression tightened in a look of understanding. She turned in his arms, and twined her own limbs around his torso. “It doesn’t have to be that way, you know,” she said as she pressed her forehead to his. “If Clark and Ollie and half the Justice League can find a way to save the world and still have a tiny little corner of it to call their own, then we can, too.”
“Hope so,” he whispered. Another thought occurred to him. “Chloe?”
“”Yeah?”
“If I’d known you back then - you would have been my dream girl.”
A smiled ghosted across her lips. “Just as long as I am now.”
“In every way,” he said.