SPN/DA Crossover Fic: The Wellspring (5/?)
Title: The Wellspring
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rating: Ah, fuck. I just said fuck. I say fuck a lot. Is that considered an R or a PG-13 these days? One of those.
Summary: Sam and Dean find a tiny smartass in a barn in Montana. What are they to do?
Previous chapters and more info can be found here.
_________________________
Chapter Five: Funyuns & Hare
__________________________
The water blankets Alec’s bare feet, gentle and lukewarm, pushed forward by the wind. He cocks his head up and back, looks at Sam who is standing close behind him. Sam is a giant.
“How is bathing in lake water going to make me clean again?”
“It couldn’t hurt.”
Alec shrugs, accepts the bar of soap from Sam’s outstretched hand. They can’t afford a place tonight, so they’re “camping.” Camping in Wyoming. Alec told them that Wyoming wasn’t safe, but they replied that nowhere was safe. They can’t go back through Montana again, not right now.
“Montana’s a big state,” Alec mumbles now.
“So is Wyoming,” Sam replies. He sounds like he’s out of patience. Alec can understand that - they’ve had this conversation at least twenty times since the decision was made.
He starts to undress. Sam stays where he is.
“I don’t need you to watch me, you know,” Alec tells him, his head halfway through his shirt. “I can swim.”
Sam grabs the shirt with big hands, eases it off. “You can?”
Alec nods, ascertains, “Better than you.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “You’re cocky like Dean, too.”
Sam tells Alec that he’ll be right over there, helping Dean set up some shelter, and Alec should yell if he needs them. Alec throws the man a disdainful look. Sam lumbers off.
The lake water is gross. Lake water’s always gross but Alec submerges himself anyway, runs the soap over his skin. He doesn’t like this, but Sam and Dean keep insisting that they’re in charge, so Alec keeps following their orders. Orders like Go take a bath, Alec. In the lake.
“Fuck the lake,” Alec mumbles. There’re fish in the lake. Fish and snakes and leeches. Alec hates fish and snakes and leeches.
And he doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to be in Wyoming, in the woods. There’s trees, everywhere, and he’s attuned to every bird in every tree, every rustling leaf, every crunch of grass. Anyone could be out here.
“Alec.”
Alec’s heart practically explodes in his chest. He whirls around in the water.
It’s Dean. Just Dean, looking at Alec with crossed arms and raised eyebrows.
“Sam says you can swim?”
Alec swallows before he scowls. “What is it with you two? I’ve been a soldier since birth. Of course I can swim.”
Dean throws two hands out in defense. “Well, you know...sorry for being a little iffy about leaving a 9-year-old alone in the water.” Alec watches the man turn around. Dean takes a few steps before he stops, throws something else over his shoulder, “And lose the bitchface, kid. People might start thinking your Sam’s clone.”
Alec feels a little bad watching Dean walk away, but honestly, he doesn’t want to be here. Wyoming woods are literally the last place he wants to be right now. Well, Wyoming woods or that hospital in Montana they’re so adamantly avoiding.
Alec sighs and starts making quick work of scrubbing his skin. The sooner he can get out of this water and back to Sam and Dean and the small camp they’ve set up, the safer he’ll feel. He’ll never admit to this, of course, because they already treat him like a dependent little kid...but if Manticore finds him, its best that he’s with Sam and Dean. They have heavy artillery in the trunk of their car. Alec’s seen it.
The leaves rustle from somewhere behind him, in the direction where Sam and Dean aren’t, and Alec stills. He turns around and the water waves gently around him, as if he’s nothing more than a slight breeze. His eyes ravage the far-off brush for movement and he hears a crunch of grass and the leaves move again and Alec freaks the fuck out, and goes under.
Tiny ugly fish swim by his face and he wonders how it is that his internal thoughts have already turned so vulgar, having spent all of three full days with Sam and Dean. Well, Dean...Dean is a bad influence and Alec is his clone. He should have guessed that something like this would have happened to his vocabulary sooner or later.
He doesn’t know how long he’s underwater but it seems like hundreds of fish swim by, and there’s at least a few snakes and he kind of wants to capture one of the snakes and put it in Sam’s bag despite any earlier repulse.
Four minutes, boring as hell, and he’s thinking that’s it time to brave it, whatever “it” is, when about thirty feet away, a body plummets into the water.
Words like shit and fuck and cuntsucker are going through his head as he writhes around, and this is all Dean’s fault.
A second body plummets into the water. Alec drops the soap, makes to swim away, but his moment of fear-induced paralysis was just a little too long and something’s got him by the waist, is pulling him in and up and now he’s breathing air.
He’s writhing and yelling and kicking.
“Alec...”
The voice is soft. Alec’s arms are flying out. He’s gonna snap this guy’s neck. He’s gonna-
“Alec!”
It’s Sam. Sam’s got him.
Dean’s on the shore, dripping pale and wet. Sam lets Alec go, but pushes him with a light hand to where Dean is standing.
“You weren’t coming up,” Sam says, once they’re both on their feet, on solid ground, and he’s blinking and looking confused and kind of like someone died.
“How long were you under there?” Dean demands to know.
Alec shakes his hair, flinging muck and water. “Four minutes...maybe? I don’t know. I could’ve gone a little longer. If it weren’t for, y’know, the rude interruption...”
“What the fuck were you-”
“Dean, don’t swear at him...Alec, why were you under there?”
“I heard something.” Alec nods to the brush on the other side of the lake. “Over there. So I took cover.”
Dean grunts. There’s a towel on a nearby tree branch. Alec recognizes it from the motel. He almost grins, thinking that its nice that these guys are into petty thievery, but then Dean’s snapping the towel off of the branch and roughly wrapping it around Alec’s body.
“Dean?”
But Dean’s already walking away.
Alec looks up at Sam. “What’s up with him?”
Sam shrugs, offers a small smile. “Dean, uh...doesn’t like being scared, Alec. And he’s emotionally repressed.”
“He’s mad at me?”
Sam doesn’t answer. He picks up Alec’s still-dry clothes and tucks them under an arm, pushing Alec forward with his hand.
“Let’s go wash your hair.”
“With what?”
“Shampoo and bottled water.”
“That’s not an economically-sound plan at all, Sam.”
“I know.”
Dean doesn’t talk to him for a very long time. He goes to the opposite side of the lake, is gone for two hours and Alec’s in a panic, because if its them, if its Manticore, they’ll kill Dean. They won’t even let him talk. They’ll just kill him. He tries to tell Sam this through harried breaths but Sam just runs a soothing hand over Alec’s head, tells him that Dean will be fine, that Dean’s always fine.
Dean’s fine. He comes back with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, a dead hare dangling limp from his hand.
“You killed a bunny?” Sam looks surprised.
“I might have cried a little,” Dean admits. The look he shoots at the dead thing in his hand is quick and Alec sees him cringe. “Poor little guy.”
“Dean, were there-”
“There wasn’t anyone there. You probably heard an animal, or the wind...or something.”
Alec watches as Dean attempts to gut the hare with his knife. But Dean can’t do it. Sam takes over, ripping into it with an admirable indifference, skinning and cleaning the thing as if it had never been alive. Sam cooks it over the fire, and the meat is tough from lack of preparation, but its okay and it fills them up enough when put alongside a bag of Funyuns apiece. Alec is pretty sure that Funyuns are the most delicious treat in the world.
Sam doesn’t agree.
“I am so sick of Funyuns,” the tall man says, throwing one of his circular snacks at Dean, who expertly catches it in his mouth. “I don’t know how you can still like them.”
“They’re delishush,” Dean says through a mouthful and much to Alec’s delight, places a hand on top of the boy’s head. “Aren’t they, kitten?”
“Best snack food ever.”
“See? Kid has taste.”
Sam pouts and Alec feels happy. Dean isn’t mad at him anymore, Sam is irritated, and all is right with the world.
Until, of course, they start talking about “the job” again.
“So, you get what we do, right?”
Alec had tried to grasp this yesterday. And sure, he’d seen the scary lady in the house that first day, had felt her go right through him, but all this...supernatural stuff wasn’t something he’d ever considered to be real. Myths and religion were something to be taken advantage of, to be seen as a weakness, in anyone who held them close.
“You hunt things from beyond the grave.” Alec is robotic in his recitation. Sam and Dean exchange glances.
“You don’t sound like you believe it,” Sam says.
“I don’t.”
“You saw a freakin’ ghost, Alec.”
Dean’s annoyed. Alec considers not being argumentative. He’s not supposed to be argumentative anyway, back at Manticore they drilled the belligerence right out of them...and Dean. Dean didn’t talk to him for four whole hours earlier and that was enough, in Alec’s opinion.
“Look...I’ll accept it when I see it.”
“When you see it again,” Dean corrects him.
“Whatever.”
Dean rolls his eyes. Sam huffs. Alec just shrugs. He wonders if these two will ever get to know him well enough to understand that he likes being infuriating.
Sam demands that Alec go to bed an hour before they do, you know, for the sake of differentiating him from the “adults.” As he lays awake, listening to them talking in low voices, listening to the fire spitting and crackling to its end, Alec wonders if Sam also enjoys being infuriating.
They use him as a barrier again. Alec hears and feels them settling down on either side of him on the ground, catches the change in breathing as they fall asleep. He wonders if they’ll ever get to know him well enough to realize that he doesn’t sleep - other than when he’s sick as hell, obviously.
The sky is black, the moon and stars are blanketed over with clouds, when Alec hears the rustle. He tells himself that it’s just animals, tells himself that its the wind, even though the air is still. But it could still be animals. His eyes dance across the brush.
It’s animals, he’s sure of it.
And then the air isn’t still anymore and there’s a breeze and the clouds move just a little. The dim glow hits pale white skin and Alec catches the form of a child, starts, jumps to his feet. He freezes and looks down.
Sam and Dean are still asleep.
Twigs snap with the footsteps. The other kid’s on the move.
Alec creeps quietly away, and then runs like hell.
____________________________________
The sun's already out when Dean wakes up, and there’s a fucking beetle on his face. He whacks at it, and the sound of his hand smacking his own cheek causes Sam’s eyes to pop open.
“Don’t hit yourself, Dean.”
“There was a fuckin’ bug-”
“Sure there was.”
It’s two more seconds before he realizes that Alec’s not between them. And then they both start calling out, but the kid doesn’t come.
“Maybe he’s taking a piss,” Sam suggests and Dean hits his kid brother in the arm. Hard. “What the fuck, Dean?”
“If he were taking a piss, he would answer us. Alec’s not a modest little bitch like you.”
“Dean, don’t panic, okay? Alec can handle himself. He took us both out before, remember? Few days ago? In the barn...”
Dean can’t listen to this shit.
“We should have avoided this place. He told us he didn’t want to be here.”
“Dean...”
Dean grabs a gun and starts through the woods. Sam follows him, stops talking, and that’s good, because Dean can’t handle any of Sam’s prototypical reassurances right now. He just needs to find the damn kid because the damn kid is an undersized Dean and Dean quite likes himself when he’s small and not inside of his own head.
But someone took Alec.
Or maybe Alec ran away. People are always running away from Dean. Dean’s well aware that Sam constantly wants to run the fuck away from him. And who can blame him? Dean’s annoying and bossy and a slob. Dad ran away from Dean, too. And if his own father couldn’t stand to be around him, then why would some escapee kid want to be his bosom buddy?
It feels like three weeks, but eventually Alec pops out from behind a tree somewhere, with leaves stuck in his hair and a dubious expression on his face.
“I saw a kid,” he says by way of explanation. “Last night while you guys were asleep and I went after him, but-”
“Why the fuck didn’t you wake us?”
Alarm flashes across Alec’s face. That wasn’t Dean. That was Sam.
Dean looks over to his brother, who looks like he’s about to go postal. He’s impressed -- Sam’s been getting better at hiding his worried little princess act as of late. Alec stammers out an apology, skirts into Dean’s side.
“Don’t swear at the kid, Sam.”
“He didn’t answer the question.”
That’s true enough. Dean looks down at the boy. Alec looks up at Dean.
“You were sleeping,” the kid shrugs. “How was I supposed to know you’d want me to wake you?”
“Were you trained to go after shit without backup?”
“I was trained to judge when I needed backup. This time, I didn’t think I needed backup. And like I said, you were sleeping.”
The kid doesn’t get it. Dean gets why he doesn’t get it. The Winchester boys were trained to judge when they needed backup, as well...though usually they were always following orders.
“Next time clear it with us. Leaving like that isn’t cool.”
“I didn’t leave,” Alec protests. “And don’t you want to know-”
“You can tell us in the car. We want to be at Bobby’s by nightfall.”
“We can’t leave! He’s here. I just know he is!”
Sam stops, so Dean stops. Alec looks at them with pleading eyes. And damn, is this kid good. Dean doesn’t remember having that particular power of persuasion growing up.
“Who’s here, Alec?” Sam’s calmed down. A little. His voice is all soft and reasonable.
Alec stands tall, looks them in the eyes. “Ben.”
Dean looks at Sam. Sam looks at Dean. The questioning is simultaneous:
“Who the fuck is Ben?”
[ Next]
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rating: Ah, fuck. I just said fuck. I say fuck a lot. Is that considered an R or a PG-13 these days? One of those.
Summary: Sam and Dean find a tiny smartass in a barn in Montana. What are they to do?
Previous chapters and more info can be found here.
_________________________
Chapter Five: Funyuns & Hare
__________________________
The water blankets Alec’s bare feet, gentle and lukewarm, pushed forward by the wind. He cocks his head up and back, looks at Sam who is standing close behind him. Sam is a giant.
“How is bathing in lake water going to make me clean again?”
“It couldn’t hurt.”
Alec shrugs, accepts the bar of soap from Sam’s outstretched hand. They can’t afford a place tonight, so they’re “camping.” Camping in Wyoming. Alec told them that Wyoming wasn’t safe, but they replied that nowhere was safe. They can’t go back through Montana again, not right now.
“Montana’s a big state,” Alec mumbles now.
“So is Wyoming,” Sam replies. He sounds like he’s out of patience. Alec can understand that - they’ve had this conversation at least twenty times since the decision was made.
He starts to undress. Sam stays where he is.
“I don’t need you to watch me, you know,” Alec tells him, his head halfway through his shirt. “I can swim.”
Sam grabs the shirt with big hands, eases it off. “You can?”
Alec nods, ascertains, “Better than you.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “You’re cocky like Dean, too.”
Sam tells Alec that he’ll be right over there, helping Dean set up some shelter, and Alec should yell if he needs them. Alec throws the man a disdainful look. Sam lumbers off.
The lake water is gross. Lake water’s always gross but Alec submerges himself anyway, runs the soap over his skin. He doesn’t like this, but Sam and Dean keep insisting that they’re in charge, so Alec keeps following their orders. Orders like Go take a bath, Alec. In the lake.
“Fuck the lake,” Alec mumbles. There’re fish in the lake. Fish and snakes and leeches. Alec hates fish and snakes and leeches.
And he doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to be in Wyoming, in the woods. There’s trees, everywhere, and he’s attuned to every bird in every tree, every rustling leaf, every crunch of grass. Anyone could be out here.
“Alec.”
Alec’s heart practically explodes in his chest. He whirls around in the water.
It’s Dean. Just Dean, looking at Alec with crossed arms and raised eyebrows.
“Sam says you can swim?”
Alec swallows before he scowls. “What is it with you two? I’ve been a soldier since birth. Of course I can swim.”
Dean throws two hands out in defense. “Well, you know...sorry for being a little iffy about leaving a 9-year-old alone in the water.” Alec watches the man turn around. Dean takes a few steps before he stops, throws something else over his shoulder, “And lose the bitchface, kid. People might start thinking your Sam’s clone.”
Alec feels a little bad watching Dean walk away, but honestly, he doesn’t want to be here. Wyoming woods are literally the last place he wants to be right now. Well, Wyoming woods or that hospital in Montana they’re so adamantly avoiding.
Alec sighs and starts making quick work of scrubbing his skin. The sooner he can get out of this water and back to Sam and Dean and the small camp they’ve set up, the safer he’ll feel. He’ll never admit to this, of course, because they already treat him like a dependent little kid...but if Manticore finds him, its best that he’s with Sam and Dean. They have heavy artillery in the trunk of their car. Alec’s seen it.
The leaves rustle from somewhere behind him, in the direction where Sam and Dean aren’t, and Alec stills. He turns around and the water waves gently around him, as if he’s nothing more than a slight breeze. His eyes ravage the far-off brush for movement and he hears a crunch of grass and the leaves move again and Alec freaks the fuck out, and goes under.
Tiny ugly fish swim by his face and he wonders how it is that his internal thoughts have already turned so vulgar, having spent all of three full days with Sam and Dean. Well, Dean...Dean is a bad influence and Alec is his clone. He should have guessed that something like this would have happened to his vocabulary sooner or later.
He doesn’t know how long he’s underwater but it seems like hundreds of fish swim by, and there’s at least a few snakes and he kind of wants to capture one of the snakes and put it in Sam’s bag despite any earlier repulse.
Four minutes, boring as hell, and he’s thinking that’s it time to brave it, whatever “it” is, when about thirty feet away, a body plummets into the water.
Words like shit and fuck and cuntsucker are going through his head as he writhes around, and this is all Dean’s fault.
A second body plummets into the water. Alec drops the soap, makes to swim away, but his moment of fear-induced paralysis was just a little too long and something’s got him by the waist, is pulling him in and up and now he’s breathing air.
He’s writhing and yelling and kicking.
“Alec...”
The voice is soft. Alec’s arms are flying out. He’s gonna snap this guy’s neck. He’s gonna-
“Alec!”
It’s Sam. Sam’s got him.
Dean’s on the shore, dripping pale and wet. Sam lets Alec go, but pushes him with a light hand to where Dean is standing.
“You weren’t coming up,” Sam says, once they’re both on their feet, on solid ground, and he’s blinking and looking confused and kind of like someone died.
“How long were you under there?” Dean demands to know.
Alec shakes his hair, flinging muck and water. “Four minutes...maybe? I don’t know. I could’ve gone a little longer. If it weren’t for, y’know, the rude interruption...”
“What the fuck were you-”
“Dean, don’t swear at him...Alec, why were you under there?”
“I heard something.” Alec nods to the brush on the other side of the lake. “Over there. So I took cover.”
Dean grunts. There’s a towel on a nearby tree branch. Alec recognizes it from the motel. He almost grins, thinking that its nice that these guys are into petty thievery, but then Dean’s snapping the towel off of the branch and roughly wrapping it around Alec’s body.
“Dean?”
But Dean’s already walking away.
Alec looks up at Sam. “What’s up with him?”
Sam shrugs, offers a small smile. “Dean, uh...doesn’t like being scared, Alec. And he’s emotionally repressed.”
“He’s mad at me?”
Sam doesn’t answer. He picks up Alec’s still-dry clothes and tucks them under an arm, pushing Alec forward with his hand.
“Let’s go wash your hair.”
“With what?”
“Shampoo and bottled water.”
“That’s not an economically-sound plan at all, Sam.”
“I know.”
Dean doesn’t talk to him for a very long time. He goes to the opposite side of the lake, is gone for two hours and Alec’s in a panic, because if its them, if its Manticore, they’ll kill Dean. They won’t even let him talk. They’ll just kill him. He tries to tell Sam this through harried breaths but Sam just runs a soothing hand over Alec’s head, tells him that Dean will be fine, that Dean’s always fine.
Dean’s fine. He comes back with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, a dead hare dangling limp from his hand.
“You killed a bunny?” Sam looks surprised.
“I might have cried a little,” Dean admits. The look he shoots at the dead thing in his hand is quick and Alec sees him cringe. “Poor little guy.”
“Dean, were there-”
“There wasn’t anyone there. You probably heard an animal, or the wind...or something.”
Alec watches as Dean attempts to gut the hare with his knife. But Dean can’t do it. Sam takes over, ripping into it with an admirable indifference, skinning and cleaning the thing as if it had never been alive. Sam cooks it over the fire, and the meat is tough from lack of preparation, but its okay and it fills them up enough when put alongside a bag of Funyuns apiece. Alec is pretty sure that Funyuns are the most delicious treat in the world.
Sam doesn’t agree.
“I am so sick of Funyuns,” the tall man says, throwing one of his circular snacks at Dean, who expertly catches it in his mouth. “I don’t know how you can still like them.”
“They’re delishush,” Dean says through a mouthful and much to Alec’s delight, places a hand on top of the boy’s head. “Aren’t they, kitten?”
“Best snack food ever.”
“See? Kid has taste.”
Sam pouts and Alec feels happy. Dean isn’t mad at him anymore, Sam is irritated, and all is right with the world.
Until, of course, they start talking about “the job” again.
“So, you get what we do, right?”
Alec had tried to grasp this yesterday. And sure, he’d seen the scary lady in the house that first day, had felt her go right through him, but all this...supernatural stuff wasn’t something he’d ever considered to be real. Myths and religion were something to be taken advantage of, to be seen as a weakness, in anyone who held them close.
“You hunt things from beyond the grave.” Alec is robotic in his recitation. Sam and Dean exchange glances.
“You don’t sound like you believe it,” Sam says.
“I don’t.”
“You saw a freakin’ ghost, Alec.”
Dean’s annoyed. Alec considers not being argumentative. He’s not supposed to be argumentative anyway, back at Manticore they drilled the belligerence right out of them...and Dean. Dean didn’t talk to him for four whole hours earlier and that was enough, in Alec’s opinion.
“Look...I’ll accept it when I see it.”
“When you see it again,” Dean corrects him.
“Whatever.”
Dean rolls his eyes. Sam huffs. Alec just shrugs. He wonders if these two will ever get to know him well enough to understand that he likes being infuriating.
Sam demands that Alec go to bed an hour before they do, you know, for the sake of differentiating him from the “adults.” As he lays awake, listening to them talking in low voices, listening to the fire spitting and crackling to its end, Alec wonders if Sam also enjoys being infuriating.
They use him as a barrier again. Alec hears and feels them settling down on either side of him on the ground, catches the change in breathing as they fall asleep. He wonders if they’ll ever get to know him well enough to realize that he doesn’t sleep - other than when he’s sick as hell, obviously.
The sky is black, the moon and stars are blanketed over with clouds, when Alec hears the rustle. He tells himself that it’s just animals, tells himself that its the wind, even though the air is still. But it could still be animals. His eyes dance across the brush.
It’s animals, he’s sure of it.
And then the air isn’t still anymore and there’s a breeze and the clouds move just a little. The dim glow hits pale white skin and Alec catches the form of a child, starts, jumps to his feet. He freezes and looks down.
Sam and Dean are still asleep.
Twigs snap with the footsteps. The other kid’s on the move.
Alec creeps quietly away, and then runs like hell.
____________________________________
The sun's already out when Dean wakes up, and there’s a fucking beetle on his face. He whacks at it, and the sound of his hand smacking his own cheek causes Sam’s eyes to pop open.
“Don’t hit yourself, Dean.”
“There was a fuckin’ bug-”
“Sure there was.”
It’s two more seconds before he realizes that Alec’s not between them. And then they both start calling out, but the kid doesn’t come.
“Maybe he’s taking a piss,” Sam suggests and Dean hits his kid brother in the arm. Hard. “What the fuck, Dean?”
“If he were taking a piss, he would answer us. Alec’s not a modest little bitch like you.”
“Dean, don’t panic, okay? Alec can handle himself. He took us both out before, remember? Few days ago? In the barn...”
Dean can’t listen to this shit.
“We should have avoided this place. He told us he didn’t want to be here.”
“Dean...”
Dean grabs a gun and starts through the woods. Sam follows him, stops talking, and that’s good, because Dean can’t handle any of Sam’s prototypical reassurances right now. He just needs to find the damn kid because the damn kid is an undersized Dean and Dean quite likes himself when he’s small and not inside of his own head.
But someone took Alec.
Or maybe Alec ran away. People are always running away from Dean. Dean’s well aware that Sam constantly wants to run the fuck away from him. And who can blame him? Dean’s annoying and bossy and a slob. Dad ran away from Dean, too. And if his own father couldn’t stand to be around him, then why would some escapee kid want to be his bosom buddy?
It feels like three weeks, but eventually Alec pops out from behind a tree somewhere, with leaves stuck in his hair and a dubious expression on his face.
“I saw a kid,” he says by way of explanation. “Last night while you guys were asleep and I went after him, but-”
“Why the fuck didn’t you wake us?”
Alarm flashes across Alec’s face. That wasn’t Dean. That was Sam.
Dean looks over to his brother, who looks like he’s about to go postal. He’s impressed -- Sam’s been getting better at hiding his worried little princess act as of late. Alec stammers out an apology, skirts into Dean’s side.
“Don’t swear at the kid, Sam.”
“He didn’t answer the question.”
That’s true enough. Dean looks down at the boy. Alec looks up at Dean.
“You were sleeping,” the kid shrugs. “How was I supposed to know you’d want me to wake you?”
“Were you trained to go after shit without backup?”
“I was trained to judge when I needed backup. This time, I didn’t think I needed backup. And like I said, you were sleeping.”
The kid doesn’t get it. Dean gets why he doesn’t get it. The Winchester boys were trained to judge when they needed backup, as well...though usually they were always following orders.
“Next time clear it with us. Leaving like that isn’t cool.”
“I didn’t leave,” Alec protests. “And don’t you want to know-”
“You can tell us in the car. We want to be at Bobby’s by nightfall.”
“We can’t leave! He’s here. I just know he is!”
Sam stops, so Dean stops. Alec looks at them with pleading eyes. And damn, is this kid good. Dean doesn’t remember having that particular power of persuasion growing up.
“Who’s here, Alec?” Sam’s calmed down. A little. His voice is all soft and reasonable.
Alec stands tall, looks them in the eyes. “Ben.”
Dean looks at Sam. Sam looks at Dean. The questioning is simultaneous:
“Who the fuck is Ben?”
[ Next]