Double Cross 1/6
Double Cross
SPN
Summary: Searching for a solution to their divine problem, Sam and Dean meet a newcomer who really shouldn’t be there.
NC-17: Het and threesome, and at least as much Sam/Dean subtext as that implies.
Thanks to kindly betas giandujakiss, geekturnedvamp, and meret.
If you want, you can read the whole thing at my site or at the Archive of Our Own.
"Shit," Dean repeated, a little muffled by the hand he'd clasped over his mouth. "Shit."
Sam would've told him to shut up if he hadn't been occupied fighting the urge to vomit. He rarely sloshed around in quite so much blood - he was soaked like a modern-day Elizabeth Bathory. Still, the blood wasn't the real problem. It was the other things: the viscera, the shit and half-digested food, stinking sharp in his nostrils so that he wished for the clean metal scent of blood alone or even the rotten eggs of demon trace.
"Sam?" Dean sounded like he was hanging onto control by two fingernails and force of will. Dean always had to be the toughest guy in the room. Or abattoir, whatever.
Sam’s head hurt.
Not surprising, really, when you considered exactly how many hard surfaces Lilith's minions had bounced it against. That, and the explosion of demonic powers near the end, when he'd thought it was their only hope of keeping the seal intact.
Good job on that, all around.
"Sammy?" Dean’s hands on his shoulders were rough, and the fabric of his jacket squelched under the pressure of Dean's fingers.
"Yeah," he slurred. He wasn’t sure how Dean had fought free of the cage they’d put him in. Jesus, the cage. He could still see it, like it was burned into his eyelids: strips of metal in the outline of a man. Except that the one they’d put Dean in had spaces in the back, where wings might extend. He turned his head, as much effort as cranking the jack to change one of the Impala’s tires, and saw the raw and bleeding flesh around Dean’s mouth where the scold’s bridle had bitten deep.
"Let's get out of here." Dean pulled him up and urged him to throw his arm around Dean's shoulder, even though that meant Dean also got covered in gore. As Dean shuffled them out of the old warehouse-cum-deathtrap, he kept up a running commentary on the untrustworthiness of angels and how pathetic it was that Castiel had no one better to send than the Winchesters.
"I mean, c'mon," Dean said, with a hollow cheer that was as horrifying as the blood drying all down Sam's back, "we're total badasses, but anybody can be outgunned." He pushed Sam into the passenger seat, then leaned over him to pull out the seatbelt and fasten it around Sam's waist.
Dean nattered on as he started the car and got them on the road. Sam only realized much later how completely thrown Dean was, because Dean didn’t pause to put towels down before shoving Sam in, even though none of the blood was Sam’s.
Dean had yet to say anything real. Presumably he was saving the true postgame analysis for Castiel, who might have a useful response. He hadn’t wasted time on theorizing with Sam for a couple of months now.
‘God only knows what Dean’s thinking’ used to be a metaphor.
He had wanted to believe that Dean had come back to him. But, no matter how hard he tried, it seemed like Dean had only come back.
"Are you going to leave?" he asked abruptly, interrupting Dean's blood-blurred musings on the nature of the number sixty-six. After tonight’s inadvertent massacre and what had happened in Idaho, he’d be a fool not to be prepared.
"What?" Dean sputtered to a halt. "No, I am not going to--you get that out of your head right now, you hear?"
Sam chuckled. "There's plenty of other stuff in there not going anywhere."
Dear threw him a nervous glance, his hands gripping the wheel hard, like Castiel's must have held him to pull him from the Pit. "This was just--you didn't--"
"I didn't what, Dean? Didn't mean it? Well, that's real reassuring. 'Cause we're so rarely in mortal danger."
Sam wished he was driving. Dean had to keep his eyes on the road, but all Sam could do was contemplate the thousand ways in which they were fucked.
"Maybe you should leave."
Dean sucked in air. A couple of the new-formed scabs burst and fresh blood stained the corners of his mouth. "Yeah, next suggestion."
Pain and fear made Sam reckless. "Okay, how's this: I start training again, so that I’m not just lashing out when there’s no other choice. We tried it your way." Dean winced, and Sam knew that he was thinking of the dozens of dead bodies left behind them, counting them on that running tally Dean kept of times he hadn't been good enough. He barrelled on, because that was not a fight he could afford right now. "I haven’t been using the powers and you know what, it hasn't stopped any of the rest of it. We are losing and we need to try something else."
Dean was silent, struggling for a response, opening and closing his mouth. Sam watched the muscles of his jaw work. The blood on his face was mostly clotted now, the wounds more superficial than Sam had feared. The circles under Dean’s eyes were as dark as a predawn sky.
At last, Dean cleared his throat. "Bobby says he heard from a crazy lady in Virginia, might know somethin' useful."
Dean wouldn't be mentioning this now if he hadn't been desperate. He'd obviously dismissed it earlier and only resurrected the reference to distract Sam.
That was okay. They could fight about the powers, the rapidly dwindling number of seals, and everything else that was wrong just as easily in Virginia as anywhere else. Dean couldn’t change the facts. The night before last, most of the skies over South America had rained blood.
Sam didn't ask what they had to lose, because he knew exactly what was left. "Let's go to Virginia," he said instead.
****
The little shop in Herndon had a neon sign in the window, a red outline of a hand with an eye in the palm. A handwritten sign informed them that readings were fifteen dollars.
Inside, the place was even smaller than it looked from the outside, all draped in red cloth that spilled over the walls and tables and chairs like some horrific skin disease had attacked. Yellow light fixtures stuck out of the walls at random intervals, pushing back the darkness a few feet. The floor was sticky under their boots and the air smelled of cheap vanilla candles and old Chinese food, probably from the restaurant down the block. Underneath that was something darker, richer, somewhere between sweat and blood.
Sam shivered, even though the air was humid.
The beads that served as a near-doorway rustled, glinting red-black. The fortune-teller emerged. She was small and round, thick in the middle but with tiny feet, all dressed in black. Her hair was short and black as well, with a fringe of white around the edges, not like it was dyed but more like a pigeon’s banded wings. She was followed by a dirty-white ball of fur, black-nosed and wearing a Christmas sweater despite the time of year (and despite the fact that it was a dog and shouldn’t be wearing any kind of sweater). The dog looked like the yippy kind, but it made no noise other than the click of claws on the tile floor. It stared at them. Sam couldn’t see any white around the deep brown irises, almost as if the dog were possessed.
Sam reached out for Dean, settled a hand on his arm and felt immediately better.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
“Hi,” Sam began. Dean just folded his arms over his chest, ever the skeptic. “We were sent here by a friend of ours, Bobby Singer.”
The fortune-teller tilted her head. “I’ve never met Mr. Singer in person. But in these dark days, anyone who knows more than a little can be an ally.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Dean said. “You got anything that might help us with our problem?”
She smiled, close-lipped, like the Cheshire Cat. “Are you willing to change your world?”
Sam glanced at Dean, who looked equally puzzled. Given that they were heading towards the Final Battle, Sam would have thought that world-changing was already on the table. “Sure,” Dean said. “Long as when we’re done there’s still a world and not some, you know, eternal fire. Or eternal harps and clouds.” Before he went to Hell, Dean would have added some crack about how both would be equally awful. He didn’t say things like that any more, even if he pretended not to remember.
The fortune-teller, of course, didn’t know that Dean had anything to repress. “Very well,” she said. Her dog barked then, just once. Sam would have expected squeakiness, but it was a deep sound that should have come from a larger animal. “Your solution is waiting for you.”
The world went midnight blue for a split second, Dean and the fortune-teller and everything else disappeared into color so intense Sam could almost taste it, cool and heavy. But then the yellow light and the gross red drapes were back, and Dean didn’t seem to have noticed anything, so Sam straightened out of his slouch. “Waiting where?”
The fortune-teller turned and started back into the depths of her store. She held up a hand dismissively; the little dog turned tail as well, shaking its ass at them.
“Well, that was mysterious and crappy,” Dean said, staring death at the ghostly blur of the dog disappearing.
Sam stifled a sigh. “We knew it was a long shot,” he pointed out.
Bobby’s leads were all that they had. He didn’t dare talk to Ruby for more than a few seconds at a time, especially not after Idaho, so everything they knew came either from Bobby’s scraps of lore or from Castiel.
Castiel had been close-mouthed, other than to tell them that there were some seals that demons simply couldn’t break on their own. After the business with Samhain, which they hadn’t even known had involved a seal when they first found the hunt, Castiel had been sending them (well, Dean, but Dean was a package deal) to clean up demonic messes surrounding the breakage, or failure to break, of various other seals. The most recent disaster had been the first time they’d been sent out in advance of the action, and given how well that had gone it seemed likely that the angels had pulled them up from the minors for lack of any other resources.
Once again, there was nothing he could do about it. “Let’s get back,” he suggested. Bobby had also sent them a few books, and at least he could get started reading them at the motel.
****
Dean dawdled in the parking lot, examining the car’s exterior. The worse things got, the more attention Dean lavished on the Impala. Dean was washing her every couple of days now. Sam hadn’t said anything about it, of course, but a few weeks back he’d bought Dean a special chamois that promised extra-gentle care. If the world was coming to an end, he wanted Dean to know that something in his life had been done right. He’d felt like an idiot handing it over, but Dean had smiled at him, that full-on lightning strike that could power a small city, and Sam had forgotten how badly they were fucked until that night, when Dean had returned from grabbing dinner with another message from Castiel.
Now, Sam waited for Dean to catch up, then opened the motel door, stepped inside, and froze.
The woman pointing two guns at them-crossdraw underarm holsters under her leather jacket, Sam noted: superbly cool-was Dean’s wet dream even without the guns. Pouty pink lips; wide evergreen eyes; a hint of freckles to add wholesomeness. Her shoulder-length wavy hair was blonde, honey-brown at the roots, another of those easy-girl signals like the Saran Wrap-tight jeans and motorcycle boots. Her garnet-red top was snug enough that they both probably would have stopped in their tracks even if she’d been otherwise unarmed.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked. When her mouth moved, Sam could see that she’d covered up some pretty serious damage around her lips. The welts were strange; she hadn’t just been punched.
Sam had other things to worry about. He kept his hands up and checked to make sure Dean was doing the same. Dean was squinting at her, a mixture of shaken and pissed. “This is our room,” Sam pointed out.
“Well, how did you get me here?” The guns were still trained directly on them, no sign that they were too heavy for her to hold for long. The look of concentration on her face was both super-sexy and oddly familiar.
Dean snorted. “Get you here? Sweetheart, we don’t-”
“Wait a second,” Sam said, raising his hand further, which miraculously worked to stifle Dean. “The fortune-teller, she said the solution would be waiting for us.”
“Fortune-teller?” the woman asked. “Crazy lady, crazy dog?” Sam nodded. “She told me she’d fix my problem if I walked outside. I did, there was a big boom, and here I am.”
“Maybe we’re supposed to help each other,” Sam suggested. “It would fit a lot of the lore. Good fortune comes to those who do good for strangers.” The woman raised an eyebrow skeptically-again Sam felt a shock of recognition, like déjà vu without the first time--but some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
“I don’t think that includes strangers who go around pointing guns at people!” Dean complained. “And also, we’ve got bigger problems than doing favors for random hot chicks.”
“I seriously doubt your problems are bigger than mine,” the woman said, tossing her head as she returned the guns to their holsters, a procedure that did interesting things to her chest.
“You’d be surprised,” Sam said. “Sam and Dean Winchester.”
She drew the guns again, and Dean threw himself sideways, pushing Sam to the floor in a painful jumble of knees and elbows.
“Stay down!” she yelled, then “Drop it or lose the hand.” Sam heard the clunk of Dean’s gun falling to the floor, then the scrape of it being kicked away from them. Sam was trying to work his gun around to where Dean could grab it from between their bodies, but it was going to take at least half a minute. Dean was still lying on as much of Sam as he could cover. Later on, Sam was going to point out to him that he wasn’t exactly the right size to work as Sam’s human shield.
Of course, Dean might not just be attempting to give Sam cover in case this was another hunter out to circumvent the End Times by ending the Antichrist. He might be trying to protect the woman from Sam. As far as Dean knew, Sam’s powers were limited to line-of-sight.
“Don’t lie to me,” the woman said, ice crackling in her voice. “Try again: Who the fuck are you?”
Dean stilled above him. Sam agreed: that wasn’t the reaction he would have expected.
“I’d say check our wallets, but I don’t think the ID would match,” Sam managed, pushing Dean off and rolling himself to a sitting position, his hands open and empty. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about us, but I don’t have horns and Dean doesn’t have wings, if that’s what-”
He stopped when she jerked the gun at him. “My name,” she said, “is Dee Winchester. I think I’d know if we had any relatives who were hunters.”
“Right back atcha,” Dean said. He was also sitting, though Sam could tell that he was preparing to launch himself across the room, because he was a damn fool like that.
“We?” Sam asked.
“Me and Samantha,” she said, as if it were obvious. “My little sister.”
Crazy as it was, Sam immediately saw the resemblance: the strong line of the jaw with the slight softness under the chin, the model-quality cheekbones, the full lips that just begged to be swollen further with kisses. The leather thong around her neck, dipping below her neckline, where an amulet might be hiding. And the cuts around her mouth, as if someone had shoved a metal bit-
“Wait a second,” Sam said, directed more at Dean than at Dee. Dee? Jesus. “Okay, when were you born?”
“What does that-fine. January 24, 1979.”
Beside him, Dean sucked in a surprised breath.
“Parents John and Mary Winchester, from Lawrence, Kansas?”
She nodded, even as he saw her fingers tighten on her guns. “Sam,” Dean complained, packing a wealth of denial into his name. Sam ignored him, running through everything he knew about alternate universes, which wasn’t much. It was more physics class than magic, but he’d survived a repeating day and a number of other even more implausible scenarios, so he was prepared to float almost any hypothesis.
“Your sister Samantha was born May 2, 1983, six months before your mother died in a fire. She grew up, went to Stanford, until-” He couldn’t finish, but that was all right, because Dee didn’t look like she wanted to hear it either.
“How do you know all that?” Dee asked, the furrow between her brows just like Dean’s. She was plainly prepared to kill him for giving the wrong answer.
“I think the fortune-teller may have grabbed you from a parallel reality,” he said. Out loud, it sounded kind of stupid, which was reinforced by the way both Dee and Dean looked at him like he’d just suggested that they team up to fight demons with Harry Potter and his friends. “Change your world,” he reminded Dean. “Your world, she said, which is kind of funny wording unless there’s something up here.”
“Sam?” Dean asked, meaning, do you really have a clue and should I still be trying for the gun?
“It's okay,” he said, bringing his legs together so that he wasn't sprawled quite so ridiculously. He still felt awkward, sitting on the floor like a kindergartener, but if he didn't get shot he could live with looking ludicrous.
“There are plenty of theories that say there are an infinite number of worlds, some involving just a single variation from our own,” he began.
If he hadn't already been convinced of his own theory, Dee's ‘please notice I’m bored’ expression, a slightly smaller version of Dean's, would have sold him. “Bottom line,” he hurried, “you're not from around here. You’re an alternate version of Dean and your sister is an alternate version of me.”
“Let's say I buy this Star Trek bull,” Dee said. “Why'n hell would bringing me here solve my problem?”
“Just so we’re clear,” Dean said, “your problem is that God wants you to be His holy warrior, which troubles you because it seems like you might be heading towards killing your--sister, and also because you aren't real impressed with God anyway?”
Sam fought to keep his face from showing his shock. Even after Idaho, Dean had never been so forthright about the possibility that Castiel’s mission was not a Winchester-friendly one on balance.
“Got it in one,” Dee said.
“I think we need to go back to that fortune-teller,” Sam said.
At last, Dee put her guns away, and when she nodded Dean retrieved his own, standing warily while Sam also rose to his feet.
****
Sam hadn’t thought that Dean would come out and say that Sam might need killing, but he’d known about the problem for a while. It had become undeniable after Idaho.
Dean had been playing dumb about Castiel’s ultimate plan for months, and Dean could give good dumb when he felt the necessity. But then a group of ten demons got the jump on them in Nampa, and before Sam could even start to worry about using the knife on them all or being forced to use his powers, Dean went all white and clammy, breathed in deep, and said, “Depart.” His voice shook with harmonics, a fucking angelic choir trumpeting in his voice. And it was demons who supposedly said their name was Legion; propaganda, every word of it.
As Sam later reconstructed events, all ten of the demons had abandoned their hosts (eight of whom lived), which was a good deal because Dean had been too busy catching Sam’s dead weight to defend himself.
Demon powers, it seemed, came with demon vulnerabilities. Sam had been cleaned up and lying down on a motel bed when he’d come to, but the headache, lingering weakness in his limbs, and, oh yeah, the stained and bloody clothes in the dumpster that Dean hadn’t had time to burn had been pretty good testimony to the fact that Dean’s Voice of Authority was anathema to Sam.
And that was setting aside how very much it sucked to be outclassed in demon control by Dean. Of course, Sam’s technique was more impressive, because he was fighting against his nature, whereas Dean was just doing what he’d been supposed to do. And he’d exorcised Samhain, which anyone would have to concede had been top-level work. But Sam’s theoretical superiority of willpower didn’t mean as much when Dean had been able to blast ten demons back to Hell with a single word.
Sam was pretty sure that obsessing over comparative demon-exorcising throw weight was the kind of thing that was likely to take him further down the demonic path. His heart had rotted in a shallow grave for four months; he hadn’t practiced safe morals in a long time, and the uncomfortable truth was that he was more vulnerable to darkness than he wanted to be, especially when there was a threat to Dean.
In any event, when he’d woken up, Dean had been sitting on the other bed facing him, shoulders hunched (weighed down by invisible wings, perhaps) and hands clasped (not praying).
“What the hell happened?” Sam had croaked, which of course had only made Dean laugh. Except that the laughter had quickly turned into a panic attack, forcing Sam to get up, shaky and nauseated, and wrap himself around Dean in what was half calming hug and half propping himself up.
Eventually, when Dean had recovered himself enough to push Sam away, he sketched out a divine mission to win the apocalypse, complete with instruction from Castiel that sounded disturbingly like Ruby’s lessons. Dean had sworn he hadn’t believed that his role was significant, not until he’d been forced to try and confronted with unmistakable evidence.
Dean could deny like a closeted Republican congressman, but some things were too obvious for that. He’d finished his explanation and stared down at his hands. “He said that if it worked on you it meant that you weren’t free of the, you know, taint. I was sure-because you stopped, Sam.” He’d sounded very young.
“I’m sorry,” Sam had said. He had been. He’d been sorry he hadn’t had the strength to pull Dean up from Hell himself; he’d been sorry that Castiel didn’t trust him; he’d been most sorry that he had hurt Dean.
“I don’t-all my life, I thought I was a weapon. Cool, you know?” Dean had refused to meet Sam’s eyes; the lines around his eyes had been deeper than usual. His hands had twisted together, his fingers worrying his ring relentlessly. “But this-I feel like I’m bein’ emptied out. Castiel called me the Lord’s vessel, Sam. I think that means God’s gonna throw out whatever’s in me that’s in the way.”
Dean’s story explained a lot about his silence over the past months, the way the car seemed to have grown ten times larger, the space between them uncrossable. The thing in Dean that was in God’s way-Sam knew full well whose name was on it.
If Dean had been the only one changed and changing, Sam could have handled it, he was sure. His demon blood, however, was remarkably insensitive to Sam’s emotional needs, and refused to give him time to adjust.
In the past few months, Sam had occasionally felt a sensation like a scab was being ripped off, if the scab was his entire skin. The first time had been when Samhain had risen, though he’d thought it was just backlash from the summoning ritual at the time. Each time, he felt invisibly larger, the demon blood in him surging like Azazel’s gift was replacing another chunk of his natural body. In fact, the power boost was probably what had enabled him to defeat Samhain in the end. After four more occurrences, he’d finally correlated the feeling of involuntary expansion with Castiel’s belated reports that another seal had fallen.
Added to that, in some of the apocryphal texts he consulted, there were brothers: one from above, and one from below. In ordinary time, brothers represented balance, opposing forces in perfect tension, but in Armageddon days they signalled mutual assured destruction.
Sam didn’t want to be starring in some Isaac and Ishmael drama. But he hadn’t been in charge of casting.
****
Dee initially headed to the driver’s side of the Impala, but when Dean cut her off, she still managed to get into the front passenger seat before Sam did, mostly because he was hanging back to observe her. Now that he thought she was probably a Bizarro Dean, it was a little freaky to be noticing her incredible ass, but her jeans made noticing unavoidable. And it wasn’t like they were actually related. At least he thought so. They never covered the important things in physics class.
In the car, Dean and Dee swapped biographical details, staying carefully away from sensitive topics. Based on the hunts Dee recalled, their worlds seemed identical except for the Winchester gender-swap. Dean’s photographic memory for awful roadside motels turned out to be extremely useful. By the time they’d reviewed an even dozen of the South’s greatest hits, Dean was convinced that Dee was some version of him, and, filtering Dee’s reactions through his Dean-vision, Sam thought that she was also on board.
“… So then Sam sticks his head in their room and says-”
“‘Where are the ashes?’” Dee finished. “‘Dad, you said he was getting his ashes hauled.’”
They both snorted as Sam turned red, even though he had nothing to be embarrassed about. “Yeah,” Dean said nostalgically, “that was pretty much the last time Dad forgot little Sammy had big ears, and he never gave up on a question.”
Dee twisted in her seat and looked back at him, her expression softer than it had been since she’d shown up. “Still doesn’t,” she said, and if her small close-mouthed smile wasn’t for him, it was near enough. “So if you’re Samantha, I guess that means that you’re gonna figure this out for us.”
“Oh, he’s Samantha, all right.”
Dee glared at Dean for that, which heartened Sam somewhat. Dee was Dean, revised. If she was another Dean, then she was good-brave, foolhardy, but mostly just good. So her being here couldn’t be wrong.
When they arrived at the fortune-teller’s place, it wasn’t there.
Dean let the car roll gently into a parking space across the street, and they all stared at the flower store that had replaced the neon sign. The poles holding the awning up were laced with rust, and the water stains on the sidewalk in front of the store, where bunches of roses and dyed carnations lolled in green plastic buckets, were etched years deep.
“Fuck,” Dean summarized.
“Time for some research,” Sam said, and Dean and Dee groaned on cue.
“I gotta get back to Samantha,” Dee said as soon as Dean had started the ignition again.
He felt a pang for Dee’s sister. If the fortune-teller had been as cryptic to Samantha as she’d been to Sam, then Samantha must be thinking that it was Trickster days all over again. She’d be feeling the blind panic Sam had felt when he’d shoveled that thin layer of dirt over Dean’s cheap coffin.
Sam remembered those days too well. They’d buried Dean’s body and most of Sam’s sanity together. Bobby had muttered words about digging deeper and the risks of animals, but Sam had ignored him, obsessing instead about the fact that he’d only left a lighter in the coffin, and when Dean woke up he might need more than that to get out. He remembered thinking that he should have put in a spade, or at least a knife, and a bottle of water. It was all he’d been able to concentrate on for days, the list of things that Dean might use, because if he was thinking of that then he wasn’t thinking about what Dean’s body looked like.
So, yeah, Sam understood that his counterpart might be experiencing some trauma from the sudden absence of her sister. In her place, he’d have started laying traps for angels by now, on the theory that Castiel might be stepping up the training regime.
In fact, even if Dee was somehow the solution to their apocalyptic problem, Sam didn’t see how bringing her here would help her version of reality at all. Most of the eschatological literature suggested that there was a rough balance between the forces of Heaven and those of Hell. If Dean really was some sort of key player, then doubling Heaven’s forces here meant leaving there undefended, which didn’t seem all that smart. Which in turn implied that the fortune-teller’s motives hadn’t been benign.
Every time he thought that their situation couldn’t get worse, the universe smacked him in the face with evidence of his lack of imagination.
****
Bobby knew nothing of any use and had never heard of parallel worlds. He promised to hit his own books and get back to them. Sam’s current mini-library was heavy on Armageddon and light on other topics, but there were plenty of relevant articles on arXiv, even though he could only understand about one in five of them.
Dee and Dean were still swapping stories, though they’d gotten more competitive as the talk turned to hunting. Sam thought about warning Dee that Dean was going to be a complete swinging dick about the topic, but neither of them were likely to appreciate his intervention. Sam did his best to tune them out. A year ago he would have told them to shut up or get out, but Dean was structurally incapable of extended silence and Sam was no longer capable of telling Dean to leave, so he was stuck with the point-counterpoint of implausible (yet mostly accurate, to the best of his knowledge) claims about various battles they’d been in.
“I can’t believe Dad raised an asshole like you,” Dee snapped, about fifteen sexist comments after Sam himself would have said something.
That statement and all that it implied was impossible for Sam to resist. He raised his head from his laptop. “He didn’t.”
That got him two death glares. Dee might possibly have thought that Sam was defending their father, but Dean plainly knew different. With both of them jiggling their legs as they sat across from each other, one bed per person, he could see how very alike they were.
“It’s just facts,” Dean said, turning his face away from Sam. “You’re a girl. You can’t beat a guy who knows what he’s doing.”
“Wanna bet?” Dee shot back, like she’d been waiting for the opening. “You, me, outside now? Loser shuts his fucking mouth?”
Dean snorted. “If only.”
Which was a slam on Dean himself, but pointing that out would be futile.
“What’s the hold-up?” Dee taunted. “Scared that a girl might kick your ass?”
Dean looked at Sam as if Sam might possibly support him in his idiocy. He wasn’t thrilled about the thought of Dean and Dee leaving his presence, but if they just went outside it should be fine. He could certainly use the quiet. He thought he was beginning to get the hang of this Many Worlds thing, and he felt the vague outlines of an idea of how to translate the science into magical terms. If he could define it properly, he could manipulate it.
“Get him, Dee,” he said.
Dean spluttered. Two minutes later, they were out the door. Sam had made them disarm, in case the cops came to break up the fight. The parking lot wasn’t visible from the road, and the place was basically deserted in the middle of the day, but the last thing they needed was for the two of them to get pulled in for violating the gun laws.
Sam got in forty-five minutes of good research time before he started to wonder whether he ought to go check and make sure they hadn’t killed each other. The thought of them both staring at him with amused contempt was enough to keep him in his seat, though not enough to keep his eyes off the little time display at the bottom right of his laptop.
Around the hour mark, something heavy slammed against the door. Sam bolted to his feet, drawing his gun. He heard fumbling with the lock-Dean’s muffled curses, and the higher, less familiar sound of Dee complaining-and then the door sprang open, rebounding off the wall as they nearly fell inside.
Sam’s jaw dropped.
Dee was wrapped around Dean, her legs tight around his waist and her arms gripping his shoulders. A line of blood trickled down Dean’s temple, and a bruise was rising over most of what Sam could see of Dee’s face, but they didn’t seem to care; their mouths were locked together like they were vacuum sealed.
Dean had one hand under Dee’s shirt, pressed hard between their bodies, and the other on her ass. The backs of his knees hit the bed nearest the door and he tumbled down. Dee freed herself from the kiss to toss her head back, her eyes closed and her pink mouth open like one of the girls in Dean’s soft-core porn.
Sam blinked rapidly. This was-sick, depraved, insane.
Utterly predictable.
Dean had her shirt off now, and was working on her bra. Dean’s lips were shiny, his eyes hot as he stared up at Dee’s dangerous curves. Sam saw a flash of black, ink dark on her breast, the only mark that had survived Hell. She was kneeling on the bed, rutting against Dean, harsh scrape of denim on denim the loudest sound in the room as he curled up, his hands squeezing her breasts and his mouth smacking wet against her skin.
“Hey!” Sam protested. He knew he was the only rational Winchester, but this was not how he wanted to be reminded of it.
“Get out or watch,” Dean mumbled from where his face was pressed into her chest.
He looked away as he saw her start to tug Dean’s T-shirt off, and moved to grab his laptop. This was crazy and disgusting and he had work to do. God, the noises they were making-
The grunts and groans were escalating as he fled. “Fucking boots,” Dean said, sounding drunk. “Turn the fuck over.” Sam closed the door, furious and relieved to be out of there, and headed to the far end of the walkway, where he could make sure nobody was approaching and still get the motel’s wireless without having to hear.
On to Part 2.
SPN
Summary: Searching for a solution to their divine problem, Sam and Dean meet a newcomer who really shouldn’t be there.
NC-17: Het and threesome, and at least as much Sam/Dean subtext as that implies.
Thanks to kindly betas giandujakiss, geekturnedvamp, and meret.
If you want, you can read the whole thing at my site or at the Archive of Our Own.
"Shit," Dean repeated, a little muffled by the hand he'd clasped over his mouth. "Shit."
Sam would've told him to shut up if he hadn't been occupied fighting the urge to vomit. He rarely sloshed around in quite so much blood - he was soaked like a modern-day Elizabeth Bathory. Still, the blood wasn't the real problem. It was the other things: the viscera, the shit and half-digested food, stinking sharp in his nostrils so that he wished for the clean metal scent of blood alone or even the rotten eggs of demon trace.
"Sam?" Dean sounded like he was hanging onto control by two fingernails and force of will. Dean always had to be the toughest guy in the room. Or abattoir, whatever.
Sam’s head hurt.
Not surprising, really, when you considered exactly how many hard surfaces Lilith's minions had bounced it against. That, and the explosion of demonic powers near the end, when he'd thought it was their only hope of keeping the seal intact.
Good job on that, all around.
"Sammy?" Dean’s hands on his shoulders were rough, and the fabric of his jacket squelched under the pressure of Dean's fingers.
"Yeah," he slurred. He wasn’t sure how Dean had fought free of the cage they’d put him in. Jesus, the cage. He could still see it, like it was burned into his eyelids: strips of metal in the outline of a man. Except that the one they’d put Dean in had spaces in the back, where wings might extend. He turned his head, as much effort as cranking the jack to change one of the Impala’s tires, and saw the raw and bleeding flesh around Dean’s mouth where the scold’s bridle had bitten deep.
"Let's get out of here." Dean pulled him up and urged him to throw his arm around Dean's shoulder, even though that meant Dean also got covered in gore. As Dean shuffled them out of the old warehouse-cum-deathtrap, he kept up a running commentary on the untrustworthiness of angels and how pathetic it was that Castiel had no one better to send than the Winchesters.
"I mean, c'mon," Dean said, with a hollow cheer that was as horrifying as the blood drying all down Sam's back, "we're total badasses, but anybody can be outgunned." He pushed Sam into the passenger seat, then leaned over him to pull out the seatbelt and fasten it around Sam's waist.
Dean nattered on as he started the car and got them on the road. Sam only realized much later how completely thrown Dean was, because Dean didn’t pause to put towels down before shoving Sam in, even though none of the blood was Sam’s.
Dean had yet to say anything real. Presumably he was saving the true postgame analysis for Castiel, who might have a useful response. He hadn’t wasted time on theorizing with Sam for a couple of months now.
‘God only knows what Dean’s thinking’ used to be a metaphor.
He had wanted to believe that Dean had come back to him. But, no matter how hard he tried, it seemed like Dean had only come back.
"Are you going to leave?" he asked abruptly, interrupting Dean's blood-blurred musings on the nature of the number sixty-six. After tonight’s inadvertent massacre and what had happened in Idaho, he’d be a fool not to be prepared.
"What?" Dean sputtered to a halt. "No, I am not going to--you get that out of your head right now, you hear?"
Sam chuckled. "There's plenty of other stuff in there not going anywhere."
Dear threw him a nervous glance, his hands gripping the wheel hard, like Castiel's must have held him to pull him from the Pit. "This was just--you didn't--"
"I didn't what, Dean? Didn't mean it? Well, that's real reassuring. 'Cause we're so rarely in mortal danger."
Sam wished he was driving. Dean had to keep his eyes on the road, but all Sam could do was contemplate the thousand ways in which they were fucked.
"Maybe you should leave."
Dean sucked in air. A couple of the new-formed scabs burst and fresh blood stained the corners of his mouth. "Yeah, next suggestion."
Pain and fear made Sam reckless. "Okay, how's this: I start training again, so that I’m not just lashing out when there’s no other choice. We tried it your way." Dean winced, and Sam knew that he was thinking of the dozens of dead bodies left behind them, counting them on that running tally Dean kept of times he hadn't been good enough. He barrelled on, because that was not a fight he could afford right now. "I haven’t been using the powers and you know what, it hasn't stopped any of the rest of it. We are losing and we need to try something else."
Dean was silent, struggling for a response, opening and closing his mouth. Sam watched the muscles of his jaw work. The blood on his face was mostly clotted now, the wounds more superficial than Sam had feared. The circles under Dean’s eyes were as dark as a predawn sky.
At last, Dean cleared his throat. "Bobby says he heard from a crazy lady in Virginia, might know somethin' useful."
Dean wouldn't be mentioning this now if he hadn't been desperate. He'd obviously dismissed it earlier and only resurrected the reference to distract Sam.
That was okay. They could fight about the powers, the rapidly dwindling number of seals, and everything else that was wrong just as easily in Virginia as anywhere else. Dean couldn’t change the facts. The night before last, most of the skies over South America had rained blood.
Sam didn't ask what they had to lose, because he knew exactly what was left. "Let's go to Virginia," he said instead.
****
The little shop in Herndon had a neon sign in the window, a red outline of a hand with an eye in the palm. A handwritten sign informed them that readings were fifteen dollars.
Inside, the place was even smaller than it looked from the outside, all draped in red cloth that spilled over the walls and tables and chairs like some horrific skin disease had attacked. Yellow light fixtures stuck out of the walls at random intervals, pushing back the darkness a few feet. The floor was sticky under their boots and the air smelled of cheap vanilla candles and old Chinese food, probably from the restaurant down the block. Underneath that was something darker, richer, somewhere between sweat and blood.
Sam shivered, even though the air was humid.
The beads that served as a near-doorway rustled, glinting red-black. The fortune-teller emerged. She was small and round, thick in the middle but with tiny feet, all dressed in black. Her hair was short and black as well, with a fringe of white around the edges, not like it was dyed but more like a pigeon’s banded wings. She was followed by a dirty-white ball of fur, black-nosed and wearing a Christmas sweater despite the time of year (and despite the fact that it was a dog and shouldn’t be wearing any kind of sweater). The dog looked like the yippy kind, but it made no noise other than the click of claws on the tile floor. It stared at them. Sam couldn’t see any white around the deep brown irises, almost as if the dog were possessed.
Sam reached out for Dean, settled a hand on his arm and felt immediately better.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
“Hi,” Sam began. Dean just folded his arms over his chest, ever the skeptic. “We were sent here by a friend of ours, Bobby Singer.”
The fortune-teller tilted her head. “I’ve never met Mr. Singer in person. But in these dark days, anyone who knows more than a little can be an ally.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Dean said. “You got anything that might help us with our problem?”
She smiled, close-lipped, like the Cheshire Cat. “Are you willing to change your world?”
Sam glanced at Dean, who looked equally puzzled. Given that they were heading towards the Final Battle, Sam would have thought that world-changing was already on the table. “Sure,” Dean said. “Long as when we’re done there’s still a world and not some, you know, eternal fire. Or eternal harps and clouds.” Before he went to Hell, Dean would have added some crack about how both would be equally awful. He didn’t say things like that any more, even if he pretended not to remember.
The fortune-teller, of course, didn’t know that Dean had anything to repress. “Very well,” she said. Her dog barked then, just once. Sam would have expected squeakiness, but it was a deep sound that should have come from a larger animal. “Your solution is waiting for you.”
The world went midnight blue for a split second, Dean and the fortune-teller and everything else disappeared into color so intense Sam could almost taste it, cool and heavy. But then the yellow light and the gross red drapes were back, and Dean didn’t seem to have noticed anything, so Sam straightened out of his slouch. “Waiting where?”
The fortune-teller turned and started back into the depths of her store. She held up a hand dismissively; the little dog turned tail as well, shaking its ass at them.
“Well, that was mysterious and crappy,” Dean said, staring death at the ghostly blur of the dog disappearing.
Sam stifled a sigh. “We knew it was a long shot,” he pointed out.
Bobby’s leads were all that they had. He didn’t dare talk to Ruby for more than a few seconds at a time, especially not after Idaho, so everything they knew came either from Bobby’s scraps of lore or from Castiel.
Castiel had been close-mouthed, other than to tell them that there were some seals that demons simply couldn’t break on their own. After the business with Samhain, which they hadn’t even known had involved a seal when they first found the hunt, Castiel had been sending them (well, Dean, but Dean was a package deal) to clean up demonic messes surrounding the breakage, or failure to break, of various other seals. The most recent disaster had been the first time they’d been sent out in advance of the action, and given how well that had gone it seemed likely that the angels had pulled them up from the minors for lack of any other resources.
Once again, there was nothing he could do about it. “Let’s get back,” he suggested. Bobby had also sent them a few books, and at least he could get started reading them at the motel.
****
Dean dawdled in the parking lot, examining the car’s exterior. The worse things got, the more attention Dean lavished on the Impala. Dean was washing her every couple of days now. Sam hadn’t said anything about it, of course, but a few weeks back he’d bought Dean a special chamois that promised extra-gentle care. If the world was coming to an end, he wanted Dean to know that something in his life had been done right. He’d felt like an idiot handing it over, but Dean had smiled at him, that full-on lightning strike that could power a small city, and Sam had forgotten how badly they were fucked until that night, when Dean had returned from grabbing dinner with another message from Castiel.
Now, Sam waited for Dean to catch up, then opened the motel door, stepped inside, and froze.
The woman pointing two guns at them-crossdraw underarm holsters under her leather jacket, Sam noted: superbly cool-was Dean’s wet dream even without the guns. Pouty pink lips; wide evergreen eyes; a hint of freckles to add wholesomeness. Her shoulder-length wavy hair was blonde, honey-brown at the roots, another of those easy-girl signals like the Saran Wrap-tight jeans and motorcycle boots. Her garnet-red top was snug enough that they both probably would have stopped in their tracks even if she’d been otherwise unarmed.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked. When her mouth moved, Sam could see that she’d covered up some pretty serious damage around her lips. The welts were strange; she hadn’t just been punched.
Sam had other things to worry about. He kept his hands up and checked to make sure Dean was doing the same. Dean was squinting at her, a mixture of shaken and pissed. “This is our room,” Sam pointed out.
“Well, how did you get me here?” The guns were still trained directly on them, no sign that they were too heavy for her to hold for long. The look of concentration on her face was both super-sexy and oddly familiar.
Dean snorted. “Get you here? Sweetheart, we don’t-”
“Wait a second,” Sam said, raising his hand further, which miraculously worked to stifle Dean. “The fortune-teller, she said the solution would be waiting for us.”
“Fortune-teller?” the woman asked. “Crazy lady, crazy dog?” Sam nodded. “She told me she’d fix my problem if I walked outside. I did, there was a big boom, and here I am.”
“Maybe we’re supposed to help each other,” Sam suggested. “It would fit a lot of the lore. Good fortune comes to those who do good for strangers.” The woman raised an eyebrow skeptically-again Sam felt a shock of recognition, like déjà vu without the first time--but some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
“I don’t think that includes strangers who go around pointing guns at people!” Dean complained. “And also, we’ve got bigger problems than doing favors for random hot chicks.”
“I seriously doubt your problems are bigger than mine,” the woman said, tossing her head as she returned the guns to their holsters, a procedure that did interesting things to her chest.
“You’d be surprised,” Sam said. “Sam and Dean Winchester.”
She drew the guns again, and Dean threw himself sideways, pushing Sam to the floor in a painful jumble of knees and elbows.
“Stay down!” she yelled, then “Drop it or lose the hand.” Sam heard the clunk of Dean’s gun falling to the floor, then the scrape of it being kicked away from them. Sam was trying to work his gun around to where Dean could grab it from between their bodies, but it was going to take at least half a minute. Dean was still lying on as much of Sam as he could cover. Later on, Sam was going to point out to him that he wasn’t exactly the right size to work as Sam’s human shield.
Of course, Dean might not just be attempting to give Sam cover in case this was another hunter out to circumvent the End Times by ending the Antichrist. He might be trying to protect the woman from Sam. As far as Dean knew, Sam’s powers were limited to line-of-sight.
“Don’t lie to me,” the woman said, ice crackling in her voice. “Try again: Who the fuck are you?”
Dean stilled above him. Sam agreed: that wasn’t the reaction he would have expected.
“I’d say check our wallets, but I don’t think the ID would match,” Sam managed, pushing Dean off and rolling himself to a sitting position, his hands open and empty. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about us, but I don’t have horns and Dean doesn’t have wings, if that’s what-”
He stopped when she jerked the gun at him. “My name,” she said, “is Dee Winchester. I think I’d know if we had any relatives who were hunters.”
“Right back atcha,” Dean said. He was also sitting, though Sam could tell that he was preparing to launch himself across the room, because he was a damn fool like that.
“We?” Sam asked.
“Me and Samantha,” she said, as if it were obvious. “My little sister.”
Crazy as it was, Sam immediately saw the resemblance: the strong line of the jaw with the slight softness under the chin, the model-quality cheekbones, the full lips that just begged to be swollen further with kisses. The leather thong around her neck, dipping below her neckline, where an amulet might be hiding. And the cuts around her mouth, as if someone had shoved a metal bit-
“Wait a second,” Sam said, directed more at Dean than at Dee. Dee? Jesus. “Okay, when were you born?”
“What does that-fine. January 24, 1979.”
Beside him, Dean sucked in a surprised breath.
“Parents John and Mary Winchester, from Lawrence, Kansas?”
She nodded, even as he saw her fingers tighten on her guns. “Sam,” Dean complained, packing a wealth of denial into his name. Sam ignored him, running through everything he knew about alternate universes, which wasn’t much. It was more physics class than magic, but he’d survived a repeating day and a number of other even more implausible scenarios, so he was prepared to float almost any hypothesis.
“Your sister Samantha was born May 2, 1983, six months before your mother died in a fire. She grew up, went to Stanford, until-” He couldn’t finish, but that was all right, because Dee didn’t look like she wanted to hear it either.
“How do you know all that?” Dee asked, the furrow between her brows just like Dean’s. She was plainly prepared to kill him for giving the wrong answer.
“I think the fortune-teller may have grabbed you from a parallel reality,” he said. Out loud, it sounded kind of stupid, which was reinforced by the way both Dee and Dean looked at him like he’d just suggested that they team up to fight demons with Harry Potter and his friends. “Change your world,” he reminded Dean. “Your world, she said, which is kind of funny wording unless there’s something up here.”
“Sam?” Dean asked, meaning, do you really have a clue and should I still be trying for the gun?
“It's okay,” he said, bringing his legs together so that he wasn't sprawled quite so ridiculously. He still felt awkward, sitting on the floor like a kindergartener, but if he didn't get shot he could live with looking ludicrous.
“There are plenty of theories that say there are an infinite number of worlds, some involving just a single variation from our own,” he began.
If he hadn't already been convinced of his own theory, Dee's ‘please notice I’m bored’ expression, a slightly smaller version of Dean's, would have sold him. “Bottom line,” he hurried, “you're not from around here. You’re an alternate version of Dean and your sister is an alternate version of me.”
“Let's say I buy this Star Trek bull,” Dee said. “Why'n hell would bringing me here solve my problem?”
“Just so we’re clear,” Dean said, “your problem is that God wants you to be His holy warrior, which troubles you because it seems like you might be heading towards killing your--sister, and also because you aren't real impressed with God anyway?”
Sam fought to keep his face from showing his shock. Even after Idaho, Dean had never been so forthright about the possibility that Castiel’s mission was not a Winchester-friendly one on balance.
“Got it in one,” Dee said.
“I think we need to go back to that fortune-teller,” Sam said.
At last, Dee put her guns away, and when she nodded Dean retrieved his own, standing warily while Sam also rose to his feet.
****
Sam hadn’t thought that Dean would come out and say that Sam might need killing, but he’d known about the problem for a while. It had become undeniable after Idaho.
Dean had been playing dumb about Castiel’s ultimate plan for months, and Dean could give good dumb when he felt the necessity. But then a group of ten demons got the jump on them in Nampa, and before Sam could even start to worry about using the knife on them all or being forced to use his powers, Dean went all white and clammy, breathed in deep, and said, “Depart.” His voice shook with harmonics, a fucking angelic choir trumpeting in his voice. And it was demons who supposedly said their name was Legion; propaganda, every word of it.
As Sam later reconstructed events, all ten of the demons had abandoned their hosts (eight of whom lived), which was a good deal because Dean had been too busy catching Sam’s dead weight to defend himself.
Demon powers, it seemed, came with demon vulnerabilities. Sam had been cleaned up and lying down on a motel bed when he’d come to, but the headache, lingering weakness in his limbs, and, oh yeah, the stained and bloody clothes in the dumpster that Dean hadn’t had time to burn had been pretty good testimony to the fact that Dean’s Voice of Authority was anathema to Sam.
And that was setting aside how very much it sucked to be outclassed in demon control by Dean. Of course, Sam’s technique was more impressive, because he was fighting against his nature, whereas Dean was just doing what he’d been supposed to do. And he’d exorcised Samhain, which anyone would have to concede had been top-level work. But Sam’s theoretical superiority of willpower didn’t mean as much when Dean had been able to blast ten demons back to Hell with a single word.
Sam was pretty sure that obsessing over comparative demon-exorcising throw weight was the kind of thing that was likely to take him further down the demonic path. His heart had rotted in a shallow grave for four months; he hadn’t practiced safe morals in a long time, and the uncomfortable truth was that he was more vulnerable to darkness than he wanted to be, especially when there was a threat to Dean.
In any event, when he’d woken up, Dean had been sitting on the other bed facing him, shoulders hunched (weighed down by invisible wings, perhaps) and hands clasped (not praying).
“What the hell happened?” Sam had croaked, which of course had only made Dean laugh. Except that the laughter had quickly turned into a panic attack, forcing Sam to get up, shaky and nauseated, and wrap himself around Dean in what was half calming hug and half propping himself up.
Eventually, when Dean had recovered himself enough to push Sam away, he sketched out a divine mission to win the apocalypse, complete with instruction from Castiel that sounded disturbingly like Ruby’s lessons. Dean had sworn he hadn’t believed that his role was significant, not until he’d been forced to try and confronted with unmistakable evidence.
Dean could deny like a closeted Republican congressman, but some things were too obvious for that. He’d finished his explanation and stared down at his hands. “He said that if it worked on you it meant that you weren’t free of the, you know, taint. I was sure-because you stopped, Sam.” He’d sounded very young.
“I’m sorry,” Sam had said. He had been. He’d been sorry he hadn’t had the strength to pull Dean up from Hell himself; he’d been sorry that Castiel didn’t trust him; he’d been most sorry that he had hurt Dean.
“I don’t-all my life, I thought I was a weapon. Cool, you know?” Dean had refused to meet Sam’s eyes; the lines around his eyes had been deeper than usual. His hands had twisted together, his fingers worrying his ring relentlessly. “But this-I feel like I’m bein’ emptied out. Castiel called me the Lord’s vessel, Sam. I think that means God’s gonna throw out whatever’s in me that’s in the way.”
Dean’s story explained a lot about his silence over the past months, the way the car seemed to have grown ten times larger, the space between them uncrossable. The thing in Dean that was in God’s way-Sam knew full well whose name was on it.
If Dean had been the only one changed and changing, Sam could have handled it, he was sure. His demon blood, however, was remarkably insensitive to Sam’s emotional needs, and refused to give him time to adjust.
In the past few months, Sam had occasionally felt a sensation like a scab was being ripped off, if the scab was his entire skin. The first time had been when Samhain had risen, though he’d thought it was just backlash from the summoning ritual at the time. Each time, he felt invisibly larger, the demon blood in him surging like Azazel’s gift was replacing another chunk of his natural body. In fact, the power boost was probably what had enabled him to defeat Samhain in the end. After four more occurrences, he’d finally correlated the feeling of involuntary expansion with Castiel’s belated reports that another seal had fallen.
Added to that, in some of the apocryphal texts he consulted, there were brothers: one from above, and one from below. In ordinary time, brothers represented balance, opposing forces in perfect tension, but in Armageddon days they signalled mutual assured destruction.
Sam didn’t want to be starring in some Isaac and Ishmael drama. But he hadn’t been in charge of casting.
****
Dee initially headed to the driver’s side of the Impala, but when Dean cut her off, she still managed to get into the front passenger seat before Sam did, mostly because he was hanging back to observe her. Now that he thought she was probably a Bizarro Dean, it was a little freaky to be noticing her incredible ass, but her jeans made noticing unavoidable. And it wasn’t like they were actually related. At least he thought so. They never covered the important things in physics class.
In the car, Dean and Dee swapped biographical details, staying carefully away from sensitive topics. Based on the hunts Dee recalled, their worlds seemed identical except for the Winchester gender-swap. Dean’s photographic memory for awful roadside motels turned out to be extremely useful. By the time they’d reviewed an even dozen of the South’s greatest hits, Dean was convinced that Dee was some version of him, and, filtering Dee’s reactions through his Dean-vision, Sam thought that she was also on board.
“… So then Sam sticks his head in their room and says-”
“‘Where are the ashes?’” Dee finished. “‘Dad, you said he was getting his ashes hauled.’”
They both snorted as Sam turned red, even though he had nothing to be embarrassed about. “Yeah,” Dean said nostalgically, “that was pretty much the last time Dad forgot little Sammy had big ears, and he never gave up on a question.”
Dee twisted in her seat and looked back at him, her expression softer than it had been since she’d shown up. “Still doesn’t,” she said, and if her small close-mouthed smile wasn’t for him, it was near enough. “So if you’re Samantha, I guess that means that you’re gonna figure this out for us.”
“Oh, he’s Samantha, all right.”
Dee glared at Dean for that, which heartened Sam somewhat. Dee was Dean, revised. If she was another Dean, then she was good-brave, foolhardy, but mostly just good. So her being here couldn’t be wrong.
When they arrived at the fortune-teller’s place, it wasn’t there.
Dean let the car roll gently into a parking space across the street, and they all stared at the flower store that had replaced the neon sign. The poles holding the awning up were laced with rust, and the water stains on the sidewalk in front of the store, where bunches of roses and dyed carnations lolled in green plastic buckets, were etched years deep.
“Fuck,” Dean summarized.
“Time for some research,” Sam said, and Dean and Dee groaned on cue.
“I gotta get back to Samantha,” Dee said as soon as Dean had started the ignition again.
He felt a pang for Dee’s sister. If the fortune-teller had been as cryptic to Samantha as she’d been to Sam, then Samantha must be thinking that it was Trickster days all over again. She’d be feeling the blind panic Sam had felt when he’d shoveled that thin layer of dirt over Dean’s cheap coffin.
Sam remembered those days too well. They’d buried Dean’s body and most of Sam’s sanity together. Bobby had muttered words about digging deeper and the risks of animals, but Sam had ignored him, obsessing instead about the fact that he’d only left a lighter in the coffin, and when Dean woke up he might need more than that to get out. He remembered thinking that he should have put in a spade, or at least a knife, and a bottle of water. It was all he’d been able to concentrate on for days, the list of things that Dean might use, because if he was thinking of that then he wasn’t thinking about what Dean’s body looked like.
So, yeah, Sam understood that his counterpart might be experiencing some trauma from the sudden absence of her sister. In her place, he’d have started laying traps for angels by now, on the theory that Castiel might be stepping up the training regime.
In fact, even if Dee was somehow the solution to their apocalyptic problem, Sam didn’t see how bringing her here would help her version of reality at all. Most of the eschatological literature suggested that there was a rough balance between the forces of Heaven and those of Hell. If Dean really was some sort of key player, then doubling Heaven’s forces here meant leaving there undefended, which didn’t seem all that smart. Which in turn implied that the fortune-teller’s motives hadn’t been benign.
Every time he thought that their situation couldn’t get worse, the universe smacked him in the face with evidence of his lack of imagination.
****
Bobby knew nothing of any use and had never heard of parallel worlds. He promised to hit his own books and get back to them. Sam’s current mini-library was heavy on Armageddon and light on other topics, but there were plenty of relevant articles on arXiv, even though he could only understand about one in five of them.
Dee and Dean were still swapping stories, though they’d gotten more competitive as the talk turned to hunting. Sam thought about warning Dee that Dean was going to be a complete swinging dick about the topic, but neither of them were likely to appreciate his intervention. Sam did his best to tune them out. A year ago he would have told them to shut up or get out, but Dean was structurally incapable of extended silence and Sam was no longer capable of telling Dean to leave, so he was stuck with the point-counterpoint of implausible (yet mostly accurate, to the best of his knowledge) claims about various battles they’d been in.
“I can’t believe Dad raised an asshole like you,” Dee snapped, about fifteen sexist comments after Sam himself would have said something.
That statement and all that it implied was impossible for Sam to resist. He raised his head from his laptop. “He didn’t.”
That got him two death glares. Dee might possibly have thought that Sam was defending their father, but Dean plainly knew different. With both of them jiggling their legs as they sat across from each other, one bed per person, he could see how very alike they were.
“It’s just facts,” Dean said, turning his face away from Sam. “You’re a girl. You can’t beat a guy who knows what he’s doing.”
“Wanna bet?” Dee shot back, like she’d been waiting for the opening. “You, me, outside now? Loser shuts his fucking mouth?”
Dean snorted. “If only.”
Which was a slam on Dean himself, but pointing that out would be futile.
“What’s the hold-up?” Dee taunted. “Scared that a girl might kick your ass?”
Dean looked at Sam as if Sam might possibly support him in his idiocy. He wasn’t thrilled about the thought of Dean and Dee leaving his presence, but if they just went outside it should be fine. He could certainly use the quiet. He thought he was beginning to get the hang of this Many Worlds thing, and he felt the vague outlines of an idea of how to translate the science into magical terms. If he could define it properly, he could manipulate it.
“Get him, Dee,” he said.
Dean spluttered. Two minutes later, they were out the door. Sam had made them disarm, in case the cops came to break up the fight. The parking lot wasn’t visible from the road, and the place was basically deserted in the middle of the day, but the last thing they needed was for the two of them to get pulled in for violating the gun laws.
Sam got in forty-five minutes of good research time before he started to wonder whether he ought to go check and make sure they hadn’t killed each other. The thought of them both staring at him with amused contempt was enough to keep him in his seat, though not enough to keep his eyes off the little time display at the bottom right of his laptop.
Around the hour mark, something heavy slammed against the door. Sam bolted to his feet, drawing his gun. He heard fumbling with the lock-Dean’s muffled curses, and the higher, less familiar sound of Dee complaining-and then the door sprang open, rebounding off the wall as they nearly fell inside.
Sam’s jaw dropped.
Dee was wrapped around Dean, her legs tight around his waist and her arms gripping his shoulders. A line of blood trickled down Dean’s temple, and a bruise was rising over most of what Sam could see of Dee’s face, but they didn’t seem to care; their mouths were locked together like they were vacuum sealed.
Dean had one hand under Dee’s shirt, pressed hard between their bodies, and the other on her ass. The backs of his knees hit the bed nearest the door and he tumbled down. Dee freed herself from the kiss to toss her head back, her eyes closed and her pink mouth open like one of the girls in Dean’s soft-core porn.
Sam blinked rapidly. This was-sick, depraved, insane.
Utterly predictable.
Dean had her shirt off now, and was working on her bra. Dean’s lips were shiny, his eyes hot as he stared up at Dee’s dangerous curves. Sam saw a flash of black, ink dark on her breast, the only mark that had survived Hell. She was kneeling on the bed, rutting against Dean, harsh scrape of denim on denim the loudest sound in the room as he curled up, his hands squeezing her breasts and his mouth smacking wet against her skin.
“Hey!” Sam protested. He knew he was the only rational Winchester, but this was not how he wanted to be reminded of it.
“Get out or watch,” Dean mumbled from where his face was pressed into her chest.
He looked away as he saw her start to tug Dean’s T-shirt off, and moved to grab his laptop. This was crazy and disgusting and he had work to do. God, the noises they were making-
The grunts and groans were escalating as he fled. “Fucking boots,” Dean said, sounding drunk. “Turn the fuck over.” Sam closed the door, furious and relieved to be out of there, and headed to the far end of the walkway, where he could make sure nobody was approaching and still get the motel’s wireless without having to hear.
On to Part 2.