Resistance
BtVS/SPN. Basically gen though Dean’s hound-doggishness is mentioned. Violence! PG-13.
Summary: Sequel to Under Darkening Skies; makes no sense without reading that first. That whole Hart/Huntsman thing comes back to haunt Sam and Dean; Dean turns to his new friends for help. AU from mid-S3 of SPN and early S8 of BtVS, so rather a lot of SPN canon is ignored.
Notes: Beta by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
giandujakiss, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shoofus, and counteragent, who were polite but firm. In Millennium Theater, I always hear Ani DiFranco sing “the resistance is still waiting to be organized,” but the lyrics sites say “the resistance is just waiting to be organized,” which is a much more hopeful sentiment. I wonder what it says about me that I hear the former.
Read the story on the AO3.
Dean ran.
The forest was loud around him, night sounds popping up and disappearing as he charged past. He wasn’t trying to be heard, but he didn’t worry too much about landing on a stray stick either. He was the most dangerous thing out and about tonight.
He jumped over a fallen log, came down at full speed. His knife, bare in his right hand, tugged at his balance, but he compensated.
The half-moon was as bright as day to him. The forest had no secrets. Through the trees, he saw his prey. Also running full-out, not wasting any time looking back.
Dean forced himself to add speed, already feeling the ache of overstressed muscles. It didn’t matter. He could feel his lips peeling back from his teeth, savage satisfaction as the yards between them became feet.
He waited until there was no chance of mistake, then threw himself forward, pushing them both to the ground, landing heavily, rolling as his target desperately attempted to throw him off. But there never could have been a doubt; Dean brought his knife up between them as smooth as if it was the only thing he’d been built to do.
At the end, the look in Sam’s eyes wasn’t peaceful, but Dean still smiled as he thrust the blade home.
****
Dean jolted awake, knife clutched at just the right angle to avoid the ribs and puncture the heart.
In the other bed, Sam was twitching, far from his usual near-motionless collapse. Even after a day spent only poking through arcane texts and trying to get Dean to look at the diagrams, Dean should’ve needed to get within a couple of feet to tell that Sam was still breathing. Dean thought he was probably running in his dream too.
Dean squeezed the hilt so hard that his fingers hurt. The blade shone blue in the faint light from outside the motel room.
Slowly, he reached under his pillow, where he could’ve sworn he’d left his gun.
Nothing.
He didn’t know whether it would be worse to have his brain playing tricks on him or for the gun actually to have altered form while he slept. He’d chosen the gun—he’d thought he’d chosen the gun—because of what knives were starting to make him daydream about.
This was way past being out of control.
Six feet away, Sam slept. Dean could’ve picked the sound of his brother’s breath out of a stadium.
Or a forest.
****
Twenty hours later, Dean staggered back into the room, hauling ass to get into the bathroom before Sam. Wincing, he peeled off his overshirt and examined the cut on his bicep. It wasn’t going to scar much.
“Dean?” Sam asked, loud enough that he had to be right outside the door.
“’m fine,” he said, putting enough vinegar in his voice that Sam might halfway believe him.
It was even true, except for the fact that the cut hadn’t come from the werewolf’s claws but from Sam’s knife. Dean’s memories of what had started the scuffle were blurry. Okay, in all honesty, he’d said something dickish and when Sam had responded in kind Dean might’ve smacked him on the back of the head. Usually that kind of thing only escalated during downtime, but tonight they’d ignored the deserted pier and the lurking werewolf until the thing had been nearly on top of them. Or, nearly on top of Sam, since he’d been on top of Dean at the time.
Only Sam’s lightning-fast reflexes had saved them both: rolling out of the way, he’d let Dean get his pistol up and shoot the thing in the heart before either of them could be clawed.
“This can’t go on,” Sam said bleakly. Dean flinched, causing a fresh swell of blood from the wound.
Sam wasn’t wrong. Dean could still feel the fierce joy of it, anger transmuted like silver melted down for bullets, blood in his mouth from when Sam had headbutted him and the taste so sweet because he knew it was almost like Sam’s would taste—
Dean didn’t mind being dangerous. But that was never supposed to extend to Sam.
Right after Sam had gotten him out of his deal, they’d visited Bobby and Dean had pulled the man aside for a chat about the Hart and the Huntsman. Bobby’d never heard of them, and Dean hadn’t explained why he was asking. He didn’t think Bobby was entirely over the whole ‘Sam’s got demonic powers’ thing, and Bobby didn’t need another reason to think Sam might be dangerous.
Plus, Bobby wasn’t the one who got him the tiny bit of information he did have.
“Maybe,” Dean said, and listened until he could hear Sam breathing through the cheap fiberglass door. “Maybe I should make a call.”
****
“Hello?”
Buffy’s voice was blurry with sleep, and he cursed himself for being so caught up he hadn’t noticed the time. The moon was starting its descent and the air had the chill of full night. Dean could see Sam’s silhouette through the curtains of their room, a hole in the shape of the world. Sam hadn’t liked the idea, and given what had happened on the hunt Dean wasn’t going to shove it in his face, which left him leaning up against the Impala out in the cold.
“Hello,” she said again, more dangerously this time.
“Buffy,” he said, and made himself man up. “This is Dean Winchester. I need your help.”
“Dean?” she repeated, awake now. “Guy who almost killed me Dean?”
Technically that was Sam, he thought, but figured that wouldn’t help his case much. “Listen, I got a serious supernatural problem here, I think maybe you and Willow could help.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“You do prophecy shit, right?”
There was a little sigh. “So what you’re saying is that you’ve got a problem that you’d like to make mine?”
Dean laughed shortly. “Believe me, I wouldn’t be calling if—”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said through a yawn. “Spit it out.”
“Couple months back, now, tarot reader we did a favor for insists on doing a reading for us. She starts with Sam, tells him some shit about a prophecy. Shows us two cards—the Huntsman and the Deer.” Dean glanced back at the door to their room, as if saying the names might’ve summoned Sam from his pacing. There was nothing. He hunkered down into his jacket, bracing against the bite of the night air.
“Those don’t sound familiar.”
“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “The reader’d never seen them in her deck until we showed up.”
“And I should care why?”
Dean grimaced. It was a fair question. “She’s in the hospital now. Tore out her own eyes.” He hadn’t even wanted the reading, dammit. The memory of her fingers, her nails covered with gore—
He swallowed. “I think it’s big, Sam thinks it’s big, but we don’t have a f—a clue what it is, and you guys seemed to know what you were doing.”
“You’d better come see us,” she told him. “And if either of you try any shenanigans this time I will personally beat you until candy comes out.”
****
“No way,” Sam said.
Dean had brought Sam coffee and an Egg McMuffin, seeing as how Dean was not going to lie down again and risk finding himself back in that dream forest. In retrospect, providing breakfast had probably been a mistake, because Sam immediately suspected some manipulation.
“We need to do something, Sam. I—” He only stumbled for a second. Next time he might be the one with the knife. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep from going after you.”
Sam scoffed, like it was completely out of the question that Dean could gut him in his sleep, and Dean really wanted to live in that world. A couple of months ago he had lived in that world, things between them so open and right that he should’ve known it couldn’t last. Dean couldn’t decide whether it was better that the thing driving them apart was obviously supernatural or worse. On the one hand: not his fault. On the other: he was seriously tired of fate giving them the old two-fingered salute. And maybe the closeness had been the illusion. After all, Dean had entered a cartoon world made out of his own psyche in order to beat the deal with Sam; realism clearly hadn’t been on the agenda. Whatever Sam had felt when he was desperate to save Dean, that didn’t mean it would stick past survival.
He gave Sam his best flat-eyed glare. “I know you’ve been looking into this, and you haven’t found jack we can use, so we need a better plan.” All Sam had was innuendo and mumbo-jumbo. The Huntsman and the Hart were locked together in a battle to the death that was also somehow an eternal cycle, because magic was just that fucking wonderful.
Sam said they just hadn’t gotten the translation from the Akkadian right yet. How Sam had known about the prophecy in the first place was also unclear to Dean, because Sam had found it in the middle of Tennessee during a completely unrelated haunting, back when they were still working together like wheels on a single axle, before the dreams really got going. Dean feared, though he wasn’t sure, that Sam had been drawn to the prophecy, resting unknown in a Civil War document repository of all places. The smell of the archive alone, sweet rotting paper and dust, had been enough to drive Dean away even without the prospect of struggling to read faded cursive on yellowing, cracked papers.
“I’m dreaming too,” Sam told him now, which was the first time he’d admitted as much. “I think I might be able to guide the dreams and find out more.” His fingers tapped nervously on his knee as he ignored his breakfast, drumming like muffled hoofbeats.
“You can do that in Virginia,” Dean pointed out, wrenching his attention away from Sam’s newest annoying habit.
Sam shook his head. “There’s a couple more libraries I want to consult out here.” First Dean had heard of that, and he didn’t know whether to call Sam on it. Sam and his secrets. Almost comforting that he was still keeping them, except for how they always ended up punching Dean in the chest.
“What do you dream?” he asked instead.
Sam’s eyes twitched, just a second of looking away from Dean, long enough that Dean knew that Sam’s dreams were just as bad as his own. For a moment the light around them dimmed towards night and the air had the sharp-sweet smell of a place where humans rarely stepped. Sam stood (bolted) and the moment broke. Sam shook his head like he was throwing off the illusion. “If you think that Willow and Buffy can help, you should go. They can keep you from doing anything too dumb, and I’ll catch up with you in a couple of days.”
Ordinarily, Dean wouldn’t have considered splitting up. Ordinarily, he wasn’t having dreams about knocking Sam out, tying him to an altar, carving him up. In the dreams, Sam’s viscera turned to antlers when he pried them out of the body. Branched and sharp as icicles, they had a velvety nap under the blood that he could still feel when he woke.
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” he said slowly. “We’ll both investigate, just from different angles. Don’t sit around here on your ass, though.”
Decision made, he rose to start packing. Best to get it done with as soon as possible.
“Dean—”
Dean froze, didn’t turn. Sam sounded like he felt, sick to his stomach at the thought of being that far apart even though it might be safer for the both of them.
“I broke into your hard head to save you last time. I’m strong enough to fix this too,” Sam finished at last. That, at least, was reassuringly normal. If anybody could out-stubborn an eternal cycle, it would have to be Sam.
“I know you will,” Dean said, because he believed it.
****
Indiana to Virginia was an unpleasant drive under the best of circumstances (which, if Dean had to think about it, he’d never experienced, so honestly this time was only slightly more sucky than any other time he’d been forced to go solo). He stumbled into the Slayers’ weird fake magazine offices at a little after ten in the morning, and the girl on duty—he was so tired that all he registered was that she was short and cute—immediately got Buffy and Willow. Buffy came out wearing what looked like pajamas. At least, Dean didn’t think that chicks were generally rocking loose pants printed with hearts and popsicles as other than sleepwear, though she looked good in that and a lavender camisole. He guessed that if you were the Chosen One the way these guys had explained it, you could show up for work dressed however the hell you wanted to.
She sized him up, hands on flannel-covered hips. Dean got it: he was a charity case, especially since he’d arrived without the brains of the operation. He managed not to react beyond clenching his jaw.
Buffy and Willow sat him in the little kitchen and gave him a cup of coffee. The girls opted for hot chocolate with little marshmallows. He would’ve taken that instead of the coffee, but they hadn’t asked. Willow wasn’t meeting his eyes at all.
“Last time we saw you, weren’t the two of you, like, surgically attached?” Buffy asked.
Dean looked down at the table. “That was before Sam found out about the friggin’ prophecy,” he admitted.
During his drive, he’d had plenty of time to think about how nothing as good as beating the deal together could last. Dean had thought different right after they’d gotten out from under the crossroads demon and the feds, but maybe that had just been relief making him dizzy. Sam still had his secrets and Dean was still, once his soul wasn’t in mortal danger, an annoyance.
“What is the prophecy, exactly?” Willow prompted.
Dean forced himself to pay attention and told them what he knew, which was located in the space between jack and squat. Dean even admitted what the damned oracle had told him: how he’d heard her say that it would come down to the huntsman and his hart except that, because he wasn’t a geek, he’d heard ‘heart’ instead until Lilah Morgan had hit the whole ‘Wolf, Ram and Hart’ thing so hard that she had to know more than she was telling.
The best information he had since then came from his dreams, and they were not exactly expository. Dean looked down at the slice of his face he could see in his cold coffee and tried to explain what he saw when he slept, even though that made his pulse pound and his feet itch to be running for real. Buffy folded her arms and leaned against the counter, her expression as closed-off and calculating as Dad’s could get on a hunt, and Willow wanted him to draw the dream-forest, but it was no use: he couldn’t make his hands repeat the images.
“But these dreams are just about Sam, right? No, just to take a random example, urges to take young girls into the forest on the orders of the evil queen. Not that you would actually do that,” Willow hastened to add.
Dean was too tired to be seriously offended or even oddly charmed. “Yeah, just Sam, not Snow White. No little bluebirds either,” he said and then felt bad. “Listen, I—”
Buffy moved to stand between them, and Dean raised his eyes to her face. His head felt like it weighed more than the Impala. “Okay, we’ve officially reached the point where you’re too tired to make sense. Will, you start researching. Dean, you—get out of the way. Try not to kill anyone or annoy anyone into killing you back, and we’ll talk in the morning.” Willow stood immediately to comply, and just for a moment Dean was so glad to have someone else who knew what she was doing giving orders, seeing farther than he could, that he almost couldn’t breathe with it.
Sam having some freaky destiny was survivable, because Sam was Sammy no matter what the rest of the world tried to say about it. For the same to happen to Dean himself was so awful that every moment he spent thinking about it made his skin crawl, and of fucking course Sam would be caught up in Dean’s problem in the worst possible way.
Dean stashed himself in a conference room and left a message for Sam—having a fucking awful time, wish you were here--before putting his head down on his arms and letting himself go, unworried for the first time in weeks about whether he’d wake up turning dream into reality.
****
Dean came to himself slumped up against a door, half-standing, panting like he’d just finished a run. He was cold, but he’d been so warm in the dream, hands gloved with blood so hot and fresh he’d screamed his pleasure up at the sky, the hunter’s moon. “It’s okay, Dean,” Sam had whispered in his ear, and then Dean had looked down to see the antlers burst through his own chest, like trees growing in stop motion. There was no pain, only Sam’s shushing, saying “I’ve got you,” just like Dean used to do when Sam had picked up a fever and Dad was nowhere to be found.
He stared at the wood grain of the door, letting it replace the images of blood on skin, and when he was able to move he checked his phone. Sam hadn’t called.
Still, Dean knew Sam was awake. He was thinking about Dean. He was thinking about Dean’s—
Dean shook his head, forcing the ideas away. Sam had gotten a little cocky what with beating the crossroads deal, which, Dean had to admit, was literally the stuff of legend and song. So if Sam was thinking he could chew through this prophecy and come out the other side untouched, that wasn’t entirely unexpected, but Dean wasn’t sure Sam was still in the driver’s seat, witness the scab on his arm. They were both a couple of pistons short of an engine right now, but Dean was the only one who seemed to get that.
Dean didn’t know what to do, but he knew that he stank, so he decided to wash his face and his pits in the bathroom down the hall and then grab a change of clothes from the car.
But on his way to a new shirt, he found Willow sitting in the waiting room at the front of the Slayers’ complex, reading what looked like a scroll. She looked up when he came into the room. “Breakfast?” she asked brightly. “There’s a place right outside.”
She was handling the fact that he’d almost killed her pretty well, and that wasn’t even factoring in the sex beforehand. Dean was pretty sure that any idea he had about how to approach the subject would be a bad one, basically because it would be a girl-related idea he came up with and therefore bad by definition. If Willow wasn’t going to give him well-justified grief, he wasn’t going to complain, and if she was just biding her time before she ripped his nuts off, well, he did owe her the opportunity to try. So he shrugged his agreement and went to open the door, gesturing her through before him.
They ate breakfast burritos stuffed with chorizo, eggs and cheese, pretty good actually. The food didn’t quite make up for the nightmares, but it didn’t hurt his mood any. And Willow did seem to have forgiven him, maybe because she was such a superpowered witch that she wasn’t insecure about being surprised a second time. She just dug into the food. Dean liked a girl with an appetite, and even if he wasn’t going there again a little bit of admiration was a warm distraction from the overall mess that was his life. She even gave him a little smile when she caught him looking.
Dean regretted fucking up with her, but at least she knew who he was.
“I think the Tarot thing’s a dead end,” she told him after she’d finished her first cup of coffee. “The Hunt in Tarot is sometimes connected to Death, but Death also means rebirth and change, and it’s just not specific enough to be any use. Stags feature occasionally in Tarot art, but the symbolism isn’t particularly focused. They’re used to show power or kingship, and sometimes as the symbol of a shaman. The more promising lead is Wolfram & Hart, except that means multidimensional evil, so it’s kind of like the surprise grab bag—anything could come out.”
It was weird to hear all that knowledge spilled out by someone other than Sam. Like déjà vu, only not quite; like the opposite of meeting Sam in the djinn’s dream world. Wrong, even if Sam was trying to protect him by keeping his distance.
“Why are you helping us?” he asked, because he couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut.
Willow looked surprised. “It’s what we do. I, uh, kind of thought it was what you did too. So, honor among thieves, or vampire hunters, right?”
Dean eked out a smile for her, remembering Gordon Walker. “Sometimes, I guess. But, uh, I appreciate it.” He didn’t know how, but the smile turned real. “I didn’t believe in ‘em, but you’re the real deal. A good witch. You have every reason to tell us to go pound sand, and don’t think I don’t know it.”
Willow set her fork down and looked at her napkin. “Let’s just say I know what it’s like to need someone to believe that you aren’t just what you do on your worst day.”
“You’ll have to tell me about that sometime,” Dean said, risking a bit of a tease in his voice.
Willow’s smile was small and secretive. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, there’s your problem.” She met his eyes. “A prophecy doesn’t come out of nowhere. Well, kinda, in the sense that sometimes they just pop up in big glowing letters, but what I mean is that you don’t get a prophecy when you’re twenty-four. You get it when you’re born, if not before; that’s what prophecy means. So, were there any signs when Sam was a baby?”
“You mean, other than the demon that fed him its blood?” Dean asked.
Willow bit her lip. “Okay, yes, but as far as we can tell that’s got nothing to do with the Huntsman and the Hart—though maybe the demon chose him because of this underlying mystical thing you inherited.”
Dean shook his head. “If my dad’d found out about anything like that, he’d’ve made it part of the hunt for the demon.”
Willow was silent for a moment. She took a deep breath, then continued: “What about your mom?”
He felt it only distantly, like going over a pothole with new shocks. “No way of telling.”
“Did you ever talk to her friends, her family?”
He shrugged. “Dad said she didn’t have family. They got married at the clerk’s office, just one of Dad’s friends as a witness.”
“Still, two brothers each with different roles, that’s the kind of thing that runs in someone’s family,” Willow said, and he had to concede the point. They didn’t have much else to go on.
“All right,” he said, sighing and already feeling the ache in his neck. “I guess it’s research time. I’ll figure out where her friends are and then maybe you can mojo me cross-country so I can ask the questions in person.”
Before he started, he checked his phone. Nothing from Sam. He hesitated, then sent another where-are-you, WTF text, because Sam already thought he was a control freak.
****
“Did you know that baby Lubber demons look a lot like kittens?” Buffy asked as she came into Willow’s office, pulling her hair out of a ponytail. “Totally unfair.”
Dean blinked up at her from his slump next to Willow. He felt like he’d been gored. The jaunty spring in Buffy’s step looked so strange it might as well have come from another world; it seemed unfair that anyone could be cheerful in this life.
Buffy frowned at him. “You don’t look so good.”
“They’re dead,” he said.
“That’s awful,” she said immediately. “Who?”
He shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “Everybody who knew my mom. Her parents. She wasn’t close to her uncle, but he died not long after she was buried. Her high school teachers. George Foreman, the guy she went to the prom with—”
Buffy opened her mouth. “Not that George Foreman,” Willow said quickly. “Just another George Foreman.”
Dean continued, because he didn’t care: “Her college roommates, all three of them. Robert Campbell, Dr. Leonard Hardecker, Corinne Wallace, Ed Campbell, Henry Parrish, Jennifer Donnelly—dead, dead, and deader. Every friend she had in the world, within a year of her death. Accident, heart attack, botched robbery, like someone was workin’ through a checklist.”
Buffy and Willow held a brief, silent Q&A with their eyes, and then Willow dragged Buffy outside the room for a quick consult in the hall. Unlike when he and Sam did that, there didn’t seem to be any shoving involved.
Dean was okay with being left alone. Mom. It was like having a healed-over scar ripped open right down to the bone. He needed to tell Sam that Winchesters turned out to spread death like some people spread the clap (not least because when Sam was listening to Dean again he’d know it wasn’t him specifically that killed everybody he loved; the whole family tree was made of poison). But also he wanted Sam to be able to live without knowing this, just for a little while longer. This time, he didn’t touch his phone.
After a couple of minutes, Buffy marched back into the office, Willow definitely not right behind her. “Okay,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Dean, I know you’re anxious, but it’s time to earn your keep around here.”
Dean brought his head up. “What?”
“I want you to go do some drills with the girls. Most of them have never been in a Slayer-versus-gun situation. We’ve got paintball guns; you know how to shoot. Take a break and we’ll hit this from another angle in the afternoon.”
He blinked at her. “Sam,” he said, which he understood from her confused stare was not an acceptable response. After a minute he pushed himself out of Willow’s chair. “Training room?” he asked, and she nodded.
“When this is over,” she said as he left, “we should go shopping. You know that they sell shirts other places than Sears, right?”
Without turning, he held his hand up in sort-of acknowledgment, because he was guessing she didn’t mean anything by it, not as an insult and not as a promise that there really would be an ‘over.’
****
Dean understood that Buffy and Willow were getting rid of him because he was useless right now. He went because they were right, and because for once it wasn’t on him alone to keep going no matter how bad he needed a break. His head was saying nothing but Sam, circling and repeating and changing pitch like an anthem. And he believed Buffy: he was doing these girls a favor, getting them ready for the real world. Superpowers or not, they’d inherited a nasty job, if not exactly in the same way he had, and he figured he’d be doing his good deed for the day by following her orders.
There were only five Slayers in the training room when he showed up. He remembered a couple of them from last time, Jael and June. The others were new, but they were game when he explained that he was, kind of, a weapons instructor. June showed him where the paint guns were kept, and one way or another he found himself promising to show her how to shoot a real gun when he got a chance.
He started them with one gun against the entire group, and tagged them all the first time they came at him. Four kill shots, though Jael might’ve survived to take him down if she could fight with a round through the shoulder, which he suspected she could. Anyway, that beginning made them respect the weapon a bit more, though in Dean’s opinion the sting of a paintball was hardly enough to be convincing. It would be better to make them see what a bullet really did, take them out and show them a body that had been shot.
Maybe a deer.
God, he wanted Sam around, watching and snarking and running—
He shook it off and they began again.
part 2
BtVS/SPN. Basically gen though Dean’s hound-doggishness is mentioned. Violence! PG-13.
Summary: Sequel to Under Darkening Skies; makes no sense without reading that first. That whole Hart/Huntsman thing comes back to haunt Sam and Dean; Dean turns to his new friends for help. AU from mid-S3 of SPN and early S8 of BtVS, so rather a lot of SPN canon is ignored.
Notes: Beta by
giandujakiss, shoofus, and counteragent, who were polite but firm. In Millennium Theater, I always hear Ani DiFranco sing “the resistance is still waiting to be organized,” but the lyrics sites say “the resistance is just waiting to be organized,” which is a much more hopeful sentiment. I wonder what it says about me that I hear the former.Read the story on the AO3.
Dean ran.
The forest was loud around him, night sounds popping up and disappearing as he charged past. He wasn’t trying to be heard, but he didn’t worry too much about landing on a stray stick either. He was the most dangerous thing out and about tonight.
He jumped over a fallen log, came down at full speed. His knife, bare in his right hand, tugged at his balance, but he compensated.
The half-moon was as bright as day to him. The forest had no secrets. Through the trees, he saw his prey. Also running full-out, not wasting any time looking back.
Dean forced himself to add speed, already feeling the ache of overstressed muscles. It didn’t matter. He could feel his lips peeling back from his teeth, savage satisfaction as the yards between them became feet.
He waited until there was no chance of mistake, then threw himself forward, pushing them both to the ground, landing heavily, rolling as his target desperately attempted to throw him off. But there never could have been a doubt; Dean brought his knife up between them as smooth as if it was the only thing he’d been built to do.
At the end, the look in Sam’s eyes wasn’t peaceful, but Dean still smiled as he thrust the blade home.
****
Dean jolted awake, knife clutched at just the right angle to avoid the ribs and puncture the heart.
In the other bed, Sam was twitching, far from his usual near-motionless collapse. Even after a day spent only poking through arcane texts and trying to get Dean to look at the diagrams, Dean should’ve needed to get within a couple of feet to tell that Sam was still breathing. Dean thought he was probably running in his dream too.
Dean squeezed the hilt so hard that his fingers hurt. The blade shone blue in the faint light from outside the motel room.
Slowly, he reached under his pillow, where he could’ve sworn he’d left his gun.
Nothing.
He didn’t know whether it would be worse to have his brain playing tricks on him or for the gun actually to have altered form while he slept. He’d chosen the gun—he’d thought he’d chosen the gun—because of what knives were starting to make him daydream about.
This was way past being out of control.
Six feet away, Sam slept. Dean could’ve picked the sound of his brother’s breath out of a stadium.
Or a forest.
****
Twenty hours later, Dean staggered back into the room, hauling ass to get into the bathroom before Sam. Wincing, he peeled off his overshirt and examined the cut on his bicep. It wasn’t going to scar much.
“Dean?” Sam asked, loud enough that he had to be right outside the door.
“’m fine,” he said, putting enough vinegar in his voice that Sam might halfway believe him.
It was even true, except for the fact that the cut hadn’t come from the werewolf’s claws but from Sam’s knife. Dean’s memories of what had started the scuffle were blurry. Okay, in all honesty, he’d said something dickish and when Sam had responded in kind Dean might’ve smacked him on the back of the head. Usually that kind of thing only escalated during downtime, but tonight they’d ignored the deserted pier and the lurking werewolf until the thing had been nearly on top of them. Or, nearly on top of Sam, since he’d been on top of Dean at the time.
Only Sam’s lightning-fast reflexes had saved them both: rolling out of the way, he’d let Dean get his pistol up and shoot the thing in the heart before either of them could be clawed.
“This can’t go on,” Sam said bleakly. Dean flinched, causing a fresh swell of blood from the wound.
Sam wasn’t wrong. Dean could still feel the fierce joy of it, anger transmuted like silver melted down for bullets, blood in his mouth from when Sam had headbutted him and the taste so sweet because he knew it was almost like Sam’s would taste—
Dean didn’t mind being dangerous. But that was never supposed to extend to Sam.
Right after Sam had gotten him out of his deal, they’d visited Bobby and Dean had pulled the man aside for a chat about the Hart and the Huntsman. Bobby’d never heard of them, and Dean hadn’t explained why he was asking. He didn’t think Bobby was entirely over the whole ‘Sam’s got demonic powers’ thing, and Bobby didn’t need another reason to think Sam might be dangerous.
Plus, Bobby wasn’t the one who got him the tiny bit of information he did have.
“Maybe,” Dean said, and listened until he could hear Sam breathing through the cheap fiberglass door. “Maybe I should make a call.”
****
“Hello?”
Buffy’s voice was blurry with sleep, and he cursed himself for being so caught up he hadn’t noticed the time. The moon was starting its descent and the air had the chill of full night. Dean could see Sam’s silhouette through the curtains of their room, a hole in the shape of the world. Sam hadn’t liked the idea, and given what had happened on the hunt Dean wasn’t going to shove it in his face, which left him leaning up against the Impala out in the cold.
“Hello,” she said again, more dangerously this time.
“Buffy,” he said, and made himself man up. “This is Dean Winchester. I need your help.”
“Dean?” she repeated, awake now. “Guy who almost killed me Dean?”
Technically that was Sam, he thought, but figured that wouldn’t help his case much. “Listen, I got a serious supernatural problem here, I think maybe you and Willow could help.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“You do prophecy shit, right?”
There was a little sigh. “So what you’re saying is that you’ve got a problem that you’d like to make mine?”
Dean laughed shortly. “Believe me, I wouldn’t be calling if—”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said through a yawn. “Spit it out.”
“Couple months back, now, tarot reader we did a favor for insists on doing a reading for us. She starts with Sam, tells him some shit about a prophecy. Shows us two cards—the Huntsman and the Deer.” Dean glanced back at the door to their room, as if saying the names might’ve summoned Sam from his pacing. There was nothing. He hunkered down into his jacket, bracing against the bite of the night air.
“Those don’t sound familiar.”
“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “The reader’d never seen them in her deck until we showed up.”
“And I should care why?”
Dean grimaced. It was a fair question. “She’s in the hospital now. Tore out her own eyes.” He hadn’t even wanted the reading, dammit. The memory of her fingers, her nails covered with gore—
He swallowed. “I think it’s big, Sam thinks it’s big, but we don’t have a f—a clue what it is, and you guys seemed to know what you were doing.”
“You’d better come see us,” she told him. “And if either of you try any shenanigans this time I will personally beat you until candy comes out.”
****
“No way,” Sam said.
Dean had brought Sam coffee and an Egg McMuffin, seeing as how Dean was not going to lie down again and risk finding himself back in that dream forest. In retrospect, providing breakfast had probably been a mistake, because Sam immediately suspected some manipulation.
“We need to do something, Sam. I—” He only stumbled for a second. Next time he might be the one with the knife. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep from going after you.”
Sam scoffed, like it was completely out of the question that Dean could gut him in his sleep, and Dean really wanted to live in that world. A couple of months ago he had lived in that world, things between them so open and right that he should’ve known it couldn’t last. Dean couldn’t decide whether it was better that the thing driving them apart was obviously supernatural or worse. On the one hand: not his fault. On the other: he was seriously tired of fate giving them the old two-fingered salute. And maybe the closeness had been the illusion. After all, Dean had entered a cartoon world made out of his own psyche in order to beat the deal with Sam; realism clearly hadn’t been on the agenda. Whatever Sam had felt when he was desperate to save Dean, that didn’t mean it would stick past survival.
He gave Sam his best flat-eyed glare. “I know you’ve been looking into this, and you haven’t found jack we can use, so we need a better plan.” All Sam had was innuendo and mumbo-jumbo. The Huntsman and the Hart were locked together in a battle to the death that was also somehow an eternal cycle, because magic was just that fucking wonderful.
Sam said they just hadn’t gotten the translation from the Akkadian right yet. How Sam had known about the prophecy in the first place was also unclear to Dean, because Sam had found it in the middle of Tennessee during a completely unrelated haunting, back when they were still working together like wheels on a single axle, before the dreams really got going. Dean feared, though he wasn’t sure, that Sam had been drawn to the prophecy, resting unknown in a Civil War document repository of all places. The smell of the archive alone, sweet rotting paper and dust, had been enough to drive Dean away even without the prospect of struggling to read faded cursive on yellowing, cracked papers.
“I’m dreaming too,” Sam told him now, which was the first time he’d admitted as much. “I think I might be able to guide the dreams and find out more.” His fingers tapped nervously on his knee as he ignored his breakfast, drumming like muffled hoofbeats.
“You can do that in Virginia,” Dean pointed out, wrenching his attention away from Sam’s newest annoying habit.
Sam shook his head. “There’s a couple more libraries I want to consult out here.” First Dean had heard of that, and he didn’t know whether to call Sam on it. Sam and his secrets. Almost comforting that he was still keeping them, except for how they always ended up punching Dean in the chest.
“What do you dream?” he asked instead.
Sam’s eyes twitched, just a second of looking away from Dean, long enough that Dean knew that Sam’s dreams were just as bad as his own. For a moment the light around them dimmed towards night and the air had the sharp-sweet smell of a place where humans rarely stepped. Sam stood (bolted) and the moment broke. Sam shook his head like he was throwing off the illusion. “If you think that Willow and Buffy can help, you should go. They can keep you from doing anything too dumb, and I’ll catch up with you in a couple of days.”
Ordinarily, Dean wouldn’t have considered splitting up. Ordinarily, he wasn’t having dreams about knocking Sam out, tying him to an altar, carving him up. In the dreams, Sam’s viscera turned to antlers when he pried them out of the body. Branched and sharp as icicles, they had a velvety nap under the blood that he could still feel when he woke.
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” he said slowly. “We’ll both investigate, just from different angles. Don’t sit around here on your ass, though.”
Decision made, he rose to start packing. Best to get it done with as soon as possible.
“Dean—”
Dean froze, didn’t turn. Sam sounded like he felt, sick to his stomach at the thought of being that far apart even though it might be safer for the both of them.
“I broke into your hard head to save you last time. I’m strong enough to fix this too,” Sam finished at last. That, at least, was reassuringly normal. If anybody could out-stubborn an eternal cycle, it would have to be Sam.
“I know you will,” Dean said, because he believed it.
****
Indiana to Virginia was an unpleasant drive under the best of circumstances (which, if Dean had to think about it, he’d never experienced, so honestly this time was only slightly more sucky than any other time he’d been forced to go solo). He stumbled into the Slayers’ weird fake magazine offices at a little after ten in the morning, and the girl on duty—he was so tired that all he registered was that she was short and cute—immediately got Buffy and Willow. Buffy came out wearing what looked like pajamas. At least, Dean didn’t think that chicks were generally rocking loose pants printed with hearts and popsicles as other than sleepwear, though she looked good in that and a lavender camisole. He guessed that if you were the Chosen One the way these guys had explained it, you could show up for work dressed however the hell you wanted to.
She sized him up, hands on flannel-covered hips. Dean got it: he was a charity case, especially since he’d arrived without the brains of the operation. He managed not to react beyond clenching his jaw.
Buffy and Willow sat him in the little kitchen and gave him a cup of coffee. The girls opted for hot chocolate with little marshmallows. He would’ve taken that instead of the coffee, but they hadn’t asked. Willow wasn’t meeting his eyes at all.
“Last time we saw you, weren’t the two of you, like, surgically attached?” Buffy asked.
Dean looked down at the table. “That was before Sam found out about the friggin’ prophecy,” he admitted.
During his drive, he’d had plenty of time to think about how nothing as good as beating the deal together could last. Dean had thought different right after they’d gotten out from under the crossroads demon and the feds, but maybe that had just been relief making him dizzy. Sam still had his secrets and Dean was still, once his soul wasn’t in mortal danger, an annoyance.
“What is the prophecy, exactly?” Willow prompted.
Dean forced himself to pay attention and told them what he knew, which was located in the space between jack and squat. Dean even admitted what the damned oracle had told him: how he’d heard her say that it would come down to the huntsman and his hart except that, because he wasn’t a geek, he’d heard ‘heart’ instead until Lilah Morgan had hit the whole ‘Wolf, Ram and Hart’ thing so hard that she had to know more than she was telling.
The best information he had since then came from his dreams, and they were not exactly expository. Dean looked down at the slice of his face he could see in his cold coffee and tried to explain what he saw when he slept, even though that made his pulse pound and his feet itch to be running for real. Buffy folded her arms and leaned against the counter, her expression as closed-off and calculating as Dad’s could get on a hunt, and Willow wanted him to draw the dream-forest, but it was no use: he couldn’t make his hands repeat the images.
“But these dreams are just about Sam, right? No, just to take a random example, urges to take young girls into the forest on the orders of the evil queen. Not that you would actually do that,” Willow hastened to add.
Dean was too tired to be seriously offended or even oddly charmed. “Yeah, just Sam, not Snow White. No little bluebirds either,” he said and then felt bad. “Listen, I—”
Buffy moved to stand between them, and Dean raised his eyes to her face. His head felt like it weighed more than the Impala. “Okay, we’ve officially reached the point where you’re too tired to make sense. Will, you start researching. Dean, you—get out of the way. Try not to kill anyone or annoy anyone into killing you back, and we’ll talk in the morning.” Willow stood immediately to comply, and just for a moment Dean was so glad to have someone else who knew what she was doing giving orders, seeing farther than he could, that he almost couldn’t breathe with it.
Sam having some freaky destiny was survivable, because Sam was Sammy no matter what the rest of the world tried to say about it. For the same to happen to Dean himself was so awful that every moment he spent thinking about it made his skin crawl, and of fucking course Sam would be caught up in Dean’s problem in the worst possible way.
Dean stashed himself in a conference room and left a message for Sam—having a fucking awful time, wish you were here--before putting his head down on his arms and letting himself go, unworried for the first time in weeks about whether he’d wake up turning dream into reality.
****
Dean came to himself slumped up against a door, half-standing, panting like he’d just finished a run. He was cold, but he’d been so warm in the dream, hands gloved with blood so hot and fresh he’d screamed his pleasure up at the sky, the hunter’s moon. “It’s okay, Dean,” Sam had whispered in his ear, and then Dean had looked down to see the antlers burst through his own chest, like trees growing in stop motion. There was no pain, only Sam’s shushing, saying “I’ve got you,” just like Dean used to do when Sam had picked up a fever and Dad was nowhere to be found.
He stared at the wood grain of the door, letting it replace the images of blood on skin, and when he was able to move he checked his phone. Sam hadn’t called.
Still, Dean knew Sam was awake. He was thinking about Dean. He was thinking about Dean’s—
Dean shook his head, forcing the ideas away. Sam had gotten a little cocky what with beating the crossroads deal, which, Dean had to admit, was literally the stuff of legend and song. So if Sam was thinking he could chew through this prophecy and come out the other side untouched, that wasn’t entirely unexpected, but Dean wasn’t sure Sam was still in the driver’s seat, witness the scab on his arm. They were both a couple of pistons short of an engine right now, but Dean was the only one who seemed to get that.
Dean didn’t know what to do, but he knew that he stank, so he decided to wash his face and his pits in the bathroom down the hall and then grab a change of clothes from the car.
But on his way to a new shirt, he found Willow sitting in the waiting room at the front of the Slayers’ complex, reading what looked like a scroll. She looked up when he came into the room. “Breakfast?” she asked brightly. “There’s a place right outside.”
She was handling the fact that he’d almost killed her pretty well, and that wasn’t even factoring in the sex beforehand. Dean was pretty sure that any idea he had about how to approach the subject would be a bad one, basically because it would be a girl-related idea he came up with and therefore bad by definition. If Willow wasn’t going to give him well-justified grief, he wasn’t going to complain, and if she was just biding her time before she ripped his nuts off, well, he did owe her the opportunity to try. So he shrugged his agreement and went to open the door, gesturing her through before him.
They ate breakfast burritos stuffed with chorizo, eggs and cheese, pretty good actually. The food didn’t quite make up for the nightmares, but it didn’t hurt his mood any. And Willow did seem to have forgiven him, maybe because she was such a superpowered witch that she wasn’t insecure about being surprised a second time. She just dug into the food. Dean liked a girl with an appetite, and even if he wasn’t going there again a little bit of admiration was a warm distraction from the overall mess that was his life. She even gave him a little smile when she caught him looking.
Dean regretted fucking up with her, but at least she knew who he was.
“I think the Tarot thing’s a dead end,” she told him after she’d finished her first cup of coffee. “The Hunt in Tarot is sometimes connected to Death, but Death also means rebirth and change, and it’s just not specific enough to be any use. Stags feature occasionally in Tarot art, but the symbolism isn’t particularly focused. They’re used to show power or kingship, and sometimes as the symbol of a shaman. The more promising lead is Wolfram & Hart, except that means multidimensional evil, so it’s kind of like the surprise grab bag—anything could come out.”
It was weird to hear all that knowledge spilled out by someone other than Sam. Like déjà vu, only not quite; like the opposite of meeting Sam in the djinn’s dream world. Wrong, even if Sam was trying to protect him by keeping his distance.
“Why are you helping us?” he asked, because he couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut.
Willow looked surprised. “It’s what we do. I, uh, kind of thought it was what you did too. So, honor among thieves, or vampire hunters, right?”
Dean eked out a smile for her, remembering Gordon Walker. “Sometimes, I guess. But, uh, I appreciate it.” He didn’t know how, but the smile turned real. “I didn’t believe in ‘em, but you’re the real deal. A good witch. You have every reason to tell us to go pound sand, and don’t think I don’t know it.”
Willow set her fork down and looked at her napkin. “Let’s just say I know what it’s like to need someone to believe that you aren’t just what you do on your worst day.”
“You’ll have to tell me about that sometime,” Dean said, risking a bit of a tease in his voice.
Willow’s smile was small and secretive. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, there’s your problem.” She met his eyes. “A prophecy doesn’t come out of nowhere. Well, kinda, in the sense that sometimes they just pop up in big glowing letters, but what I mean is that you don’t get a prophecy when you’re twenty-four. You get it when you’re born, if not before; that’s what prophecy means. So, were there any signs when Sam was a baby?”
“You mean, other than the demon that fed him its blood?” Dean asked.
Willow bit her lip. “Okay, yes, but as far as we can tell that’s got nothing to do with the Huntsman and the Hart—though maybe the demon chose him because of this underlying mystical thing you inherited.”
Dean shook his head. “If my dad’d found out about anything like that, he’d’ve made it part of the hunt for the demon.”
Willow was silent for a moment. She took a deep breath, then continued: “What about your mom?”
He felt it only distantly, like going over a pothole with new shocks. “No way of telling.”
“Did you ever talk to her friends, her family?”
He shrugged. “Dad said she didn’t have family. They got married at the clerk’s office, just one of Dad’s friends as a witness.”
“Still, two brothers each with different roles, that’s the kind of thing that runs in someone’s family,” Willow said, and he had to concede the point. They didn’t have much else to go on.
“All right,” he said, sighing and already feeling the ache in his neck. “I guess it’s research time. I’ll figure out where her friends are and then maybe you can mojo me cross-country so I can ask the questions in person.”
Before he started, he checked his phone. Nothing from Sam. He hesitated, then sent another where-are-you, WTF text, because Sam already thought he was a control freak.
****
“Did you know that baby Lubber demons look a lot like kittens?” Buffy asked as she came into Willow’s office, pulling her hair out of a ponytail. “Totally unfair.”
Dean blinked up at her from his slump next to Willow. He felt like he’d been gored. The jaunty spring in Buffy’s step looked so strange it might as well have come from another world; it seemed unfair that anyone could be cheerful in this life.
Buffy frowned at him. “You don’t look so good.”
“They’re dead,” he said.
“That’s awful,” she said immediately. “Who?”
He shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “Everybody who knew my mom. Her parents. She wasn’t close to her uncle, but he died not long after she was buried. Her high school teachers. George Foreman, the guy she went to the prom with—”
Buffy opened her mouth. “Not that George Foreman,” Willow said quickly. “Just another George Foreman.”
Dean continued, because he didn’t care: “Her college roommates, all three of them. Robert Campbell, Dr. Leonard Hardecker, Corinne Wallace, Ed Campbell, Henry Parrish, Jennifer Donnelly—dead, dead, and deader. Every friend she had in the world, within a year of her death. Accident, heart attack, botched robbery, like someone was workin’ through a checklist.”
Buffy and Willow held a brief, silent Q&A with their eyes, and then Willow dragged Buffy outside the room for a quick consult in the hall. Unlike when he and Sam did that, there didn’t seem to be any shoving involved.
Dean was okay with being left alone. Mom. It was like having a healed-over scar ripped open right down to the bone. He needed to tell Sam that Winchesters turned out to spread death like some people spread the clap (not least because when Sam was listening to Dean again he’d know it wasn’t him specifically that killed everybody he loved; the whole family tree was made of poison). But also he wanted Sam to be able to live without knowing this, just for a little while longer. This time, he didn’t touch his phone.
After a couple of minutes, Buffy marched back into the office, Willow definitely not right behind her. “Okay,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Dean, I know you’re anxious, but it’s time to earn your keep around here.”
Dean brought his head up. “What?”
“I want you to go do some drills with the girls. Most of them have never been in a Slayer-versus-gun situation. We’ve got paintball guns; you know how to shoot. Take a break and we’ll hit this from another angle in the afternoon.”
He blinked at her. “Sam,” he said, which he understood from her confused stare was not an acceptable response. After a minute he pushed himself out of Willow’s chair. “Training room?” he asked, and she nodded.
“When this is over,” she said as he left, “we should go shopping. You know that they sell shirts other places than Sears, right?”
Without turning, he held his hand up in sort-of acknowledgment, because he was guessing she didn’t mean anything by it, not as an insult and not as a promise that there really would be an ‘over.’
****
Dean understood that Buffy and Willow were getting rid of him because he was useless right now. He went because they were right, and because for once it wasn’t on him alone to keep going no matter how bad he needed a break. His head was saying nothing but Sam, circling and repeating and changing pitch like an anthem. And he believed Buffy: he was doing these girls a favor, getting them ready for the real world. Superpowers or not, they’d inherited a nasty job, if not exactly in the same way he had, and he figured he’d be doing his good deed for the day by following her orders.
There were only five Slayers in the training room when he showed up. He remembered a couple of them from last time, Jael and June. The others were new, but they were game when he explained that he was, kind of, a weapons instructor. June showed him where the paint guns were kept, and one way or another he found himself promising to show her how to shoot a real gun when he got a chance.
He started them with one gun against the entire group, and tagged them all the first time they came at him. Four kill shots, though Jael might’ve survived to take him down if she could fight with a round through the shoulder, which he suspected she could. Anyway, that beginning made them respect the weapon a bit more, though in Dean’s opinion the sting of a paintball was hardly enough to be convincing. It would be better to make them see what a bullet really did, take them out and show them a body that had been shot.
Maybe a deer.
God, he wanted Sam around, watching and snarking and running—
He shook it off and they began again.
part 2
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