Fic:Through The Looking Glass (1/1)
Fic: Through The Looking Glass (1/1)
Summary: Dean leaves normal behind.
Author: Pen37
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters:Chloe, Dean
Rating: pg 13 for language
A/N:Written for chleanthursday.
Dean kept sneaking sideways glances at the soaking wet blonde who was sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala. She was looking out the rain-soaked window as they turned down a side street headed to her apartment.
He still couldn’t quite believe the conversation they’d just had. She didn’t directly say that she had healed him. But in a roundabout way she confirmed it. And that one little confirmation was just the tip of an iceberg so large that he wasn’t sure how deeply it went. The thought was frightening.
Maybe she felt the same way, because she gave him an out: Take her home. Drop her off at her doorstep. Walk away and don’t look back. A smart man would call that a good bargain.
Of course, Dean never thought of himself as the brains of the family. Which was why he was trying to figure out how to see her again. Dean sighed. Part of him wondered why his smooth as silk way with women deserted him all of a sudden.
“You . . . Uh . . . want some coffee?” He glanced across the seat to Chloe. The girl stiffened, and turned to stare at him with narrowed eyes.
“It’s just that I know of a good place one block over,” Dean hurried on quickly. “Great place to warm up when you’re freezing.”
She looked down at her lap as she picked at the hem of her jacket. Then she gave a short nod to herself. “I . . . think I know which place you’re talking about. It sounds . . . good.”
Dean gave her a half smile. It was a start. He turned the Impala down another rain slicked street while she went back to staring out the passenger window. Suddenly, she sat up straighter. “Stop the car!”
Dean looked at her in confusion. “What?”
Her eyes seemed to take on a burning intensity as all hesitation drained away like the rainwater dripping out of her hair. “Pull over! Now”
Dean hastily complied. When the Impala was parked, he looked at her with an eyebrow raised in concern. But she had ducked her head to the point that she could watch behind them out the side mirror. Dean started to turn, but her hand on his shoulder stopped him.
“Don’t look behind us.”
“What is it?” Dean asked.
“Something not good,” Chloe said. “Do you have a tire iron or something?”
Dean frowned. There were only so many things - outside of changing a tire -- which one could use a tire iron for. None of them were good.
“What’s going on?”
“Don’t ask,” she said shortly. “It’s nothing you want to be involved in.”
“Should we call the police?”
The look she gave him was scathing. “I wish I could.” Her voice sounded tired. It kind of reminded him of the way dad sounded that time he stole Sammy’s bank card for that wild graduation weekend. Well, it had been Sammy's graduation, and he had the wild weekend.
Then He hadn’t liked the sound in Dad’s voice, and now he didn’t like it in hers. She sat up abruptly, and dug a pen and paper from her purse. “If I’m not back inside fifteen minutes, you call this number. Ask for my cousin, Lois Lane. Tell her what happened. Then go home. Don’t get out of your car. Don’t come look for me.”
Dean’s eyes got wide. Whatever she was involved in, it was more than just healing people.
She frowned, and tilted her head so that he had to look her in the eye. “I said, don’t get out of the car.”
“Chloe,” he gave her an incredulous look. “This is crazy.”
The look she leveled at him stopped his protests. “This is my life.”
Dean sighed. Reluctantly, he pulled the trunk release cable. “My baseball equipment is back there. The Louisville Slugger may be more useful.”
Chloe tipped her head in acknowledgement. Then she gave him a lopsided smile, and quickly got out of the car. Dean watched as she retrieved his bat from the trunk and then trotted up the sidewalk and into an alley.
Dean checked his watch. After five minutes, he reached for the door handle. “Screw it.” Rain quickly sluiced down the back of his neck and ran in rivulets between his shoulder blades and the inside of his jacket. He rounded to the trunk, and found his equipment scattered haphazardly among his old fast food wrappers and back issues of Maxim. He grimaced at that.
By the time he pulled the spare tire from its mounting and retrieved the tire tool, he figured that fifteen minutes had passed. He followed Chloe’s steps to the alley. The space there was dark and cold. The only thing he could hear was the gurgle of the rainwater running through the gutters.
Dean’s few cautious steps were like stepping out of a familiar world. Like those children’s stories that he and Sammy used to sneak on the side so that mom wouldn’t know that they were reading them. The ones that usually started with a rabbit hole a mirror or a magical closet.
His thoughts were interrupted when someone grabbed his arm, spun him around and slammed him roughly against the brick wall on one side of the alley. Dean felt the tire iron slip from his hands. His head connected with the brick behind him. Then he knew nothing more.
#
“I told you to stay in the car.” Chloe’s subdued tones cut through the darkness like a lighthouse through a stormy night.
Dean groaned. He was aware of small hands on his shoulders, supporting his neck and head. He risked opening his eyes, and saw Chloe’s concerned eyes. Her dirt-streaked face seemed paler.
“What happened?” He asked.
“You didn’t stay where you were supposed to.” Chloe sounded even more annoyed. “And you had a concussion.”
“Had?” Dean remembered being slammed into a wall. He thought that his head should hurt worse, all things considered. Then he squinted at her again. “What about you?”
Her lips slanted in a bitter smile. “I had your concussion. Past tense.”
“That’s two I owe you for,” he said.
Chloe made a derisive sound as she helped him to sit up. Now he could see that they were in some sort of cage. Beyond the cage they were in some kind of abandoned refrigerator or meat locker or something. The walls were lined with broken electronics and tools, bits of machine junk and accumulated refuse.
“The hell? Were we kidnapped by white slavers or something?”
“Vampires.” Chloe said shortly. “I totally misread what I thought I saw. I never suspected them because they’ve been almost completely hunted out.”
Dean blinked. He ran the word through his head two or three times. It sounded more ridiculous each time. “Vampires? Like . . . sparkly emo dudes who are stuck in high school forever?”
Chloe put her face in her hands. “Not even close. Vampires are like . . . cross a shark with a wolf and give it a human form and that’s a vampire. We are in deep shit.”
Dean swallowed and nodded. “Okay. So we get out of it. Don’t you have some way of signaling for help?”
“Signaling . . .” she trailed off as she eyed the walls speculatively.
Dean turned to follow her gaze, and saw wiring conduit rise from the floor to an old phone jack. “Tell me you can use that.”
“I can use that. If I can get out of here.” She moved to the door of the cage, and studied the old lock. Dean followed her. When she reached into her blouse and began to unhook her bra, he took a step back in surprise.
Chloe grinned at him. “Underwire. I can use the hardware to pick the lock.”
“Where do you learn this stuff?” Dean asked.
“Here and there.” She picked the undergarment clean the way a vulture picks a carcass. Then she cocked an eyebrow at Dean. “If I drop this, you’re not going to take it home and sleep with it under your pillow, are you?”
Dean felt his face grow hot all the way out to his ears. “Lady, you’ve got one warped sense of humor.”
“I know,” Chloe said. “It’s a coping mechanism.” She set to work bending the wire, then inserted it into the lock. Before long, Dean heard a click, and the cage swung open.
“Try to scavenge what you can quickly,” Chloe said. “Don’t worry about being quiet. The walls are lined, so they probably won’t hear us in here.”
“Why didn’t they kill us right off?” Dean asked as he pulled a broken lid off of a crate that was mostly filled with car phones from about 1994.
“Give me one of those,” Chloe said. After playing with it for a moment, she frowned in disappointment. “No signal. As to why we're not dead; we’re a little like farm animals to vampires. If you kill the chicken, you don’t get anymore eggs.”
“So what happens on Sunday when the pastor comes to dinner?” Dean asked sarcastically.
“You go get another chicken on Monday.” Chloe deadpanned. She stood up triumphantly, showing Dean a small tool kit. Then she walked over to the conduit, and began to pry it from the wall.
Dean watched as she began stripping the ends from the wire inside the conduit. “You said that Vampires were almost hunted to extinction. That means that there are people who hunt them.”
Chloe sighed. Then she looked up at Dean. In the fluorescent lights of the room. Her eyes held an old, exhausted look. “Please don’t ask me any more questions.”
Dean frowned. “What is your deal?”
She looked down again as she began to wire components from the phone into the conduit wires. “My deal is that before we met, you had a normal life. And in the time that it takes to give me a ride home, you’re hip deep in Vampires.”
She finished what she was doing and looked up at him again. “I didn’t save you for this. “
Dean crossed his arms. “Who says you get to decide?”
Chloe grimaced. “Why couldn’t I save a brain surgeon?” She asked rhetorically. “Someone respectable who spends his spare time working for Doctors without Borders fixing cleft palates for little African children. Nooo. I have to save another damn hero.”
“You think I’m a hero?” Dean grinned at her.
Chloe responded with a glare. “You’ve got the right attitude, mister.”
“So tell me about Vampires,” Dean said. Off her glare, he put his hands up. “Hey. We may die in a few minutes anyway if they come back. I think I have a right to know what it is that’s trying to kill me. “
Her expression remained stony, so Dean tried again. “You can’t expect to get the Genie back in the bottle. Especially not one this size.”
Chloe looked down again. “Djinn’s don’t live in bottles.”
Dean blinked at that. “You mean, they’re real too?”
The phone suddenly lit up. Chloe leaned down to press her ear to it. Then she looked up at Dean and held up one finger. “We make it out alive, and I promise, we’ll talk.”
Dean nodded. It would have to do.
#
Time seemed to drag by as Chloe sat against one wall, a makeshift weapon resting on her knees. She had scavenged through the junk and found a length of sharp, rusty scrap metal, some wire and a length of broken plank to jury rig an axe. If they had to fight it out, it was a pitiful weapon. But it was better than nothing. She had explained to Dean what her reasons were, and he had quickly done the same.
Now Dean sat next to her, but made no move to talk. Occasionally, he gave her an odd, searching look. But mostly he was lost in his own thoughts.
Chloe left him to them. It wasn’t always easy to find out that the monster under the bed was real. That kind of knowledge could leave a man seriously questioning their place in the world. Especially when it was all dumped on you at once.
In her case, there hadn’t been much in the way of crisis of faith because she’d graduated from square watermelons to meteor mutants to aliens to vampires ghosts and ghouls.
The question was, what he intended to do with the information. And because she felt responsible for him, Chloe had a sinking feeling that Dean Winchester was about to become a permanent fixture in her life.
Before she could explore that thought further, a clanking sound from across the room alerted her to the fact that they were about to have company. She stood, with the weapon across one shoulder. Dean copied the move.
Abruptly the door was thrown open, and Gordon Walker’s head poked into the room. He saw them and grinned. As he stepped fully into the room, Chloe could see that he was covered in gore. She shuddered. If she and Dean hadn’t been on the menu, she might have felt sorry for the vampires.
Chloe lowered the weapon to rest against the toe of her ballet flat. Next to her, Dean kept his up.
Walker looked at them. Then he grinned at her. The grin reminded her a little of a school bully who had just found a new subject to torment.
“Is that little Chloe Sullivan? Look at you: All grown up and stranded alone in a vampire nest?”
Chloe responded to Walker the way she always had the bullies in high school, with verbal judo. “Still trying to convince little girls to do your dirty work?”
“That was just business, Chloe.” Walker’s smirk faded.
“Ellen didn’t seem to think so,” Chloe said. “What are you doing here?”
“Ellen called. She said there was a nest that needed cleaning out.”
Chloe nodded. Walker wasn’t anyone’s first choice for a hunt. And Ellen would sooner eat her own liver than call him. So if the Roadhouse’s owner had called him in, then Walker was the only hunter close enough to Metropolis to render aide. “Thank you, “she said grudgingly.
“I didn’t do it for you,” Walker said with a smirk. “That’s just a side benefit.”
“Then we’ll leave you to it.” Chloe took Dean’s free hand and shot him a look that begged that he not say anything. Dean’s eyes never left Walker’s. And for the first time since meeting him, Chloe could see something dangerous in his expression. It was more than the usual alpha male posture that the guys she knew usually wore. This was akin to an expression that she’d seen in other hunters and in Bruce during his dark moments.
“Come on, let’s go.” She said. Dean nodded once, and allowed her to lead him past Walker and out of the room.
“By the way, Sullivan?” Walker called after her.
Chloe’s back stiffened. She forced herself to turn and look at him.
“You been keeping an eye on this alien?”
“Superman?” Chloe grinned. “He’s on our side.”
“Doubt that,” Walker muttered. “He ain’t human. Sooner or later, he’ll turn against humans.”
Chloe turned around again, and walked away. When they were out in the Impala again, with the weapons stored in the trunk, she seemed to collapse. Dean turned to her with a concerned expression.
“Whatever happens to you: don’t become that,” she said. “Superman may not be human, but Walker is inhuman. There is a big difference.”
Dean looked down at his watch. It was almost 4 a.m. “I guess coffee is out of the question.”
“I’ll make us some,” Chloe said. “I promised to explain everything to you.“
Dean nodded.
“You can still back out,” Chloe said. Hope made her voice seem warm. “Drop me off at home and go on with your life.”
Dean thought about it. Even if he’d never met Chloe, if he’d found out about things another way, he couldn’t walk away from that kind of knowledge. “No, I can’t.”
Her response was a wry twist of her lips. “I didn’t think you could.”
A/N: The incident I'm referring to happened in the Supernatural webblog from between Seasons one and two. Jo was so desperate to become a real boy hunter that she partnered with Walker. He used her as bait to hunt a rawhead. After that point, Walker was banned from the Roadhouse.