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grumkin_snarkChapter Title: And Then There Were Two
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,776
Summary: In the end, it’s a complete accident that gets Dean Winchester out of Hell.
Chapter III: And Then There Were Two
Dean had finally gotten into the heart of Seattle, and it’d taken him an embarrassingly long time, but really, the way he sees it, he gets a little leeway for being sluggish. Just ’cause his body’s more or less all back together doesn’t mean the injuries (to put it mildly) he sustained don’t still feel like they’re there.
On the way over, Dean makes mental note of his effects. Apart from the soaked clothing, there isn’t much. Miraculously, he’s kept his watch—9:47 A.M., which seems accurate despite the timepiece, too, suffering Hell; he makes a mental note to send a five-star comment card to Suunto—his wooden bracelet blessed by an old Creole priestess down in the bayous, and the silver ring that was Mary’s dad’s and then Mary’s is still on his finger, though with more scratches in it than he remembered. The thing he feels the most absent, however, is the Egyptian pendant Sam had given him back in ’91. The weight had been around his neck for near seventeen years, and it isn’t anymore. Dean wonders where it is, hopes that maybe Sam has it. Because frankly, he feels rather naked without it lying against his chest.
As he gets farther away from the parking lot, he starts to see actual civilization. Which is a good thing, considering he was beginning to think Seattle was completely abandoned. Hell, if that happened, who was to say the whole world wasn’t like that? That those creepy hooded figures and Dean were the only people left? A friggin’ real-life 28 Days Later? Dean wouldn’t be able to cope with that.
So he takes stock of how rundown nearly every building is, the houses no longer kept up, roofs sagging, paint chipping, sidewalks cracked so badly that weeds are growing in between, very few cars on the streets in favor of rickety bicycles and the occasional motorcycle.
Abruptly, Dean has the desire for a hard drink, not just for his scratchy throat, but also to dull the shock of what he’d just landed into. Problem is, he’s not sure where to go. He wanders for a while, the rain not letting up, and then finally spots an establishment whose sign labels “Crash,” and from the sounds it emits he guesses it’s a bar, or at least a pool hall. He would say “Thank God for that,” but far as he can tell, there is no God. So instead he just thinks, Finally.
Dean doesn’t really want to see what he looks like, so avoids the mirror by the entrance, and just walks in. He’s not very surprised to see that everyone is dressed rather like the buildings are, fashion unclear. He is irritated, though, to hear the music coming out of the speakers: it’s some shitty, anemic, alternative cyber-techno crap that Dean’s sure didn’t exist when he was alive (and, Jesus, that sounds weird, ’cause he’s alive now; or, more precisely, alive again. Holy shit, he thinks, he’s a fuckin’ zombie). Evidently, thirteen years gave birth to this wannabe music and said sayonara to the Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Fuck society.
He weaves his way through the crowd, uneasy with the sudden overwhelming contact of people, let alone the lascivious glances he gets from a girl or two, or even the occasional double take. Finding his destination, Dean collapses in a stool at the bar, forehead thunking on the lacquered wood for a few seconds as his abused heart and lungs catch up with themselves, before he finally gets the strength to bring his head upright.
His shoulders are still hunched, his chest feels like it’s burning from the inside out—Christ, Dean can’t ever remember feeling this out of shape—and he’s sure his eyes look dead, but it’s not the bartender’s job to psychoanalyze him, so when Dean orders a scotch, neat, it slides towards him without much hesitation.
As the amber liquid starts to fall down his throat, Dean really, really regrets ordering it. The drink feels like languid fire in his mouth, and even though he knows that’s just the alcohol, he can’t help but think of when it was real fire sliding down his body, and he starts coughing, his insides smoking and gurgling the whole time.
Before he knows it, another glass is placed right under his face, this one filled with ice and clear liquid that smells nothing like vodka and has to be pure water. Dean’s body is telling him to slow down, but he grabs the new glass and tosses back the water. It’s frigid against the flames going on within him, yet with each successive swallow, they start to die down a little. Once they subside, Dean is panting, and somewhat self-conscious, but mostly composed once more.
He looks up at the bartender, who is serving another patron, but his light hazel eyes are watching Dean. When the customer is sated, the man comes back over and refills Dean’s water glass, moving the scotch away.
“You all right, man?” he asks.
Dean huffs a laugh. Well, well, isn’t that a loaded question. Dean tries to speak, and can’t. It’s not the aftereffects of the scotch, it’s his damn vocal cords again. He’d practiced speaking on the way over here, and managed a few words, though he certainly isn’t up to a conversation. His will is strong, but it can’t work miracles. His body can only go so far.
So Dean settles for shaking his head. Getting an admittedly very pathetic idea, he moves his hand in the motion of writing, and although the barkeep frowns, he chooses to humor his patron, reaches under the bar, and presents Dean with a pad of paper and pen, both sticky with alcohol.
Grateful that his hand works better than his larynx, Dean grabs the utensil and presses it to the paper, scrawling What day is it? Why is Seattle so fucked? in print that only has a vague similarity to the way he used to write. Nevertheless, the words are legible enough, and he faces the pad towards the man across from him.
“You on something, kid?” the bartender asks once he reads Dean’s note.
Can’t talk here, dude. And no, I’m not on something, I’ve just gotten out of Hell. Screw you.
Maybe it’s a good idea he can’t speak at the moment, he concedes. Otherwise, he might just drive himself out of the bar. And that would kinda suck balls. Dean shakes his head again, and nods towards the paper. The bartender looks like he wants to get away from Dean’s crazy, but the other people at the bar are too content to assist.
The man sighs, like Dean’s a fucking burden. If only he actually knew what Dean went through. But he answers just the same, “June 10, 2021.”
Dean chokes on the sip of water he’d just taken, feeling some of it go unpleasantly up his nose and down his windpipe. “2021…” he breathes hoarsely, unsure if the bartender could tell what he said.
He’d calculated that it’d been thirteen years since he went to Hell, but hearing the confirmation…okay, so it’s only a little over a decade, but the time is messing with Dean’s head. Time had lapsed on Earth, except Dean’s already lived far longer than that, and it’s taking a while to sort things out.
He breathes in again, this time oxygen the only thing going down his airway. Still processing the date, he points to the other part of his note, and looks expectantly at the bartender.
If possible, the guy looks at Dean even stranger than he did before. “The Pulse,” he says. From the guy’s expression, Dean gets the sense the words are supposed to mean something to him, but they don’t. Dean raises his eyebrows, waiting. “Damn, you’re really out of it.” Dean glares, and he comes to find out that, even after this long, it is just as effective as ever. “An electromagnetic wave that wiped out all communication systems and digital information in the country, which sent America into chaos. Nearly every city’s like this.”
Well, I’ll say it again, Dean internally groans, what the fuck?
Dean takes another long drink of water, and almost literally feels his cells sigh in relief as they absorb the fluid. He senses the bartender edge away from him, apparently judging him, sane enough to leave by himself, and Dean, honestly, is glad for the departure. Perhaps somewhat oddly, considering he hasn’t had real human contact since he bitched out Ruby—but it wasn’t Ruby, Dean reminds himself with a start, and he wishes he’d thought to find out the actual girl’s name; she kinda looked like a Carrie, maybe a Katie—in Lilith’s body.
Then he catches a voice above the chatter of the crowd. It’s kind of hard not to when he somehow knows the words and accompanied glare are directed at him.
“Hey!” the voice, a man’s, yells. “It’s that tranny freak from TV!”
Tranny? Considering he’s not contemplating a sex change, Dean gets the sense that the comment, whatever it means, is contextual and looks over, confused. It’s then he realizes he’s on the ground and his face hurts like…well, like he just got it punched in.
Dean scrambles to his feet, a yard or so away from the man who looks like he’s spitting an inferno. What the fuck, man? Get the hell away from me! is what Dean would much like to say, but for the damaged life of him, he can’t. Although by the sliver of disquiet that just graced the guy’s face, Dean’s pretty damn sure his own expression said the words just as well.
The other patrons around the bar had looked over when Dean got clocked, and while some are thoroughly confused like Dean, others are starting to look like Dean’s attacker. “Yeah, you’re right,” a woman in her late forties says, and stares at Dean like he’s lower than vermin.
And, okay, hold up, Dean would like very much to take offense to that. Fine, his moral center may be a little crooked, and he’s done some things he’s not proud of, but vermin? Really, that’s kind of harsh. It’s more than that, though, Dean’s quickly deducing. It’s like they know him, have seen him before, and want to kill him Friday the 13th style. What’d that guy say? They’d seen him on TV?
Dean thinks for a shell-shocked minute that they’re actually saying they recognize him from those newscasts forever ago—none of which were his fault, mind you—but then he quickly disregards that. It neither explained the “tranny” slur, nor the fact that everyone is looking at him like they know him. Most people could watch a broadcast and then see the culprit later that day and not put it together. Not a chance do these barflies see him as Dean Winchester, murderer. (Fucking shapeshifters. Dean would really like to just plug each and every one of them full of silver.)
He thinks that even in his current state, he can put the joker who punched him out of commission. It’d take more than an overweight, middle-aged man with a spare tire to kill him (again). And no fucking way is Dean going to risk going back to Hell the day he gets out of it.
So he decides to make what he and Sam always called a “tactical retreat.” “We’re ‘falling back,’ Sammy,” Dean remembers himself telling his brother once, the time Sam was nine-ish, he and Dean had been face-to-face with their first chupacabra, and Sam had asked why they were “running away.”
“Winchesters never run away,” Dean had said sternly. “They make a tactical retreat. Remember that.” Sam did. He never accused Dean of doing such a thing again. Except when berating him of emotionally running away, but Dean is not going to go into that.
Just for good measure, however, he pulls back his hand and slams his fist into the guy’s mug, sending him flying a good five feet away. Dean wants so badly to spit something cruel or caustic at him, but settles for more death glares. It’d kind of defeat the purpose of his hit if he showed the onlookers that he’s effectually incapable of speech at present.
What Dean does is sprint. Out of the back door he’d cased on his way in—useful habits should never die—and into the alleyway. His feet take him out of that and into the street which, like before, has few pedestrians. He looks behind him, almost expecting to see a mob following him, but they aren’t. When he turns back around, he finds himself colliding straight on with someone.
It’s a woman, whom he’d place mid-twenties, with chocolate skin and corkscrew curls hastily wrapped in two ponytails, and she’s flat on her back on the concrete. Dean blinks, and then immediately reaches down a hand to pull her up. To his surprise, she smirks, ignores his offering, and stands up. She barely reaches Dean’s chin, but still he takes a step back from her.
“Alec, what’ve we said about you touchin’ Original Cindy? She likes you, boy, but don’t no one go knockin’ her about,” says the woman.
“’M sorry,” Dean whispers, wishing for another glass of water. He guesses this is the sort of woman who would smack around anyone who didn’t give her a quick answer, and, his throat be damned, he continues, “Who’re you?”
The woman—Original Cindy did she call herself? Dean’s not sure what kind of name that is, or who speaks of themselves in the third person, but he’s going to refer to her as plain Cindy, thanks—raises a manicured eyebrow and crosses her arms.
“What you playin’ at?” she demands. Then she frowns a little, like she’s actually studying him this time. “What’s up wit’ you? You look…diff’rent.”
Dean’s shoulders fall, and he leans against the brick wall for support. This is getting nowhere. What he needs is someone who’ll tell him what is going on, what kind of world he’s burst into, what happened to him. What he needs is Sam. Dean feels a knot in his throat that has nothing to do with dehydration. There have been very few moments in his life where he’s felt like he’s going to break down, but now is one, apparently (that’s two already just today; he’s getting sloppy). He doesn’t know why it comes on so abruptly, but it is, and he closes his eyes, wanting it to be over.
He’d fully anticipated Cindy to walk on with a last weird stare at him, but then he feels a sharp swat on the back of his head, and his eyes snap open because, damn it, his day’s already bad, and he doesn’t want more pain, please. He snarls at the woman, whoever the fuck she is.
Cindy’s face is peering at his, her brown eyes searching. Dean feels uncomfortable, and if there’s something he’s never been saddled with, it’s the inability to conceal himself. So he cuts off anything she may see in his eyes, and most of what she may see in his face, but the latter he can’t be sure, because truthfully, he’s pretty disconnected.
“Alec?” Cindy asks again, taking Dean’s chin and moving his head to the side. “You—” Something like half-comprehension falls into her expression, and she exhales heavily. “Oh hell no, Original Cindy ain’t gettin’ paid enough for this.”
She looks Dean up and down again, and then takes his hand. Dean’s alarmed, and he moves to rip it away, but damn this chick’s strong. So, all right fine, maybe Dean wants the tiniest bit to hear her out, if nothing else than just because she’s not trying to pummel his lights out, yet it certainly doesn’t mean he wants to be manhandled.
“Come on, clone boy,” she snaps. “I ain’t got all day, you know.”
Clone? Dean repeats in his head. What is with all these names? Who do people think I am?
Dean’s damn good at dealing with shit hitting the fan, and this is without a doubt one of the most bizarre times he’s had to do it (in a very long, storied history of bizarre, for the record; even more so, thus far, than that crazy slow-dancing alien business), but he’ll do it anyway. Regardless, Cindy seems to know something that he doesn’t, and that’s a start. Dean’s gone on less.
So he hesitantly allows her to snatch his hand again, and she starts walking the opposite way she was when he’d into her; he has no choice but to follow. A block or so away from the bar, she strikes up conversation. Dean’d been hoping she wouldn’t.
“You got a name, sugar?” she questions, glancing at him sideways. Dean wonders if she always picks up random strangers like they’re family.
“Um, Dean,” Dean swallows. He’s getting better at this voice thing. Or, that is, at outwilling his body. “My name is Dean.”
Cindy makes some noncommittal noise. “So what are you? X4, X5? Gotta be straight with you, don’t know much more’n that.”
Dean groans. He’s pretty sure—really pretty sure—it’s safe to say things are fully snafu at this point. “I’m Dean,” he repeats cautiously. “I’m…human…?”
I just hope you’re human, too. He really does. She doesn’t seem like a demon, but then, Meg didn’t either, and look how that turned out. But Dean is a fuckin’ expert at reading people—he had been suspicious of Meg from the start—and this woman just doesn’t seem the type. For one thing, she has too much personality for Hellspawn, and demons usually don’t mix up their marks. Let alone say their mark is a clone. So yeah, he’s, like, ninety-six percent sure she’s not evil.
Cindy chuckles. “Least I know you’re not one of those clones who thinks they’re property,” she says.
“I’m not a fucking clone!” Dean seethes. He’s well aware that he sounds as angry as a puppy—fuck it, even that reminds him of Sam—but the thought is there, and he’s sure Cindy gets the venom behind his words.
An emotion that he can only place as surprise crosses her face, like his response was the furthest thing from what she’d envisioned. “Aiight,” she says finally, and Dean knows she’s humoring him, but if that’s the best he’s going to get, then he’ll take it. Cindy points to the location at which they’ve ended up. “Home sweet home.”
Dean takes in the place, and can’t exactly say it’s quite a building. More like a building’s skeleton, with scaffolding and plastic tarp as reinforcement; it’s more a construction site than…oh, God, Dean didn’t just come all this way with a homeless lunatic, did he?
Cindy sees the hidden panic in Dean’s eyes, and, taking a guess, she shrugs and heads into where she’s squatting, enters the hallway and stairs that’ll lead to her apartment. A few seconds later, she hears heavy footfalls behind her, and a corner of her mouth quirks. Dean doesn’t come up to pace with her, but when Cindy reaches her door, she holds it open for him. He doesn’t say anything, and she wouldn’t normally do this, but he does look like he’s about ready to drop, so she lends him a little kindness.
“Sit yo’ ass down,” Cindy commands, and Dean, not one to refuse a soft couch, brushes aside an ancient Vogue magazine and some laundry in order to sit unobstructed.
Cindy turns around to go to the kitchen and make coffee—she has a feeling she’s definitely going to need it—but when she looks back at Dean to ask him if he wants cream or sugar, she finds him dead to the world. (It’d of course be an unfortunate phrase had she known Dean’s history, but she doesn’t, so.) She glances at the two full mugs of steaming joe in her hands, and then back at Dean’s form, before chuckling again and setting one down on the counter.
She takes the opportunity to scrutinize the guy, because, hell, he doesn’t seem like the kind of person to let her do that while awake. She sits on her coffee table and stares at him. His clothes are still in the stages of drying, and his boots look too heavy to be comfortable, but he’d walked fine with them before.
As if it weren’t already, once she moves to his face, her day officially ranks among the most peculiar she’s ever had. She’s staring at Alec, and yet…not. And it isn’t Ben either (she doesn’t know much, because neither Max nor Alec really want to talk about him, but she hazards a guess he, too, looks the same).
She can see it now, better than when he was moving around and all anguished-like. Cindy observes the light creases next to his eyes that Alec hasn’t yet gained, and the laugh lines around his mouth—even though she doesn’t peg Dean as the sort of guy who laughs all that much. She sees his skin is weather beaten, like he’s spent all his life outdoors, and yet still touched by youth. Curious, and on a whim, she lifts up his shirt, exposing his torso.
Cindy stifles her shock. She’d presumed his skin would be tanned, smooth, beautiful like his face, but it isn’t. Sure, his body’s fit, and mostly unmarred, but his chest isn’t. Right over his heart, there are jagged lines crisscrossing over and under and around, like someone had taken a dagger and tried to cut out his heart, or maybe carve something off. Cindy doesn’t know what it is, but she looks at Dean’s painted face again, and wonders. She silently sets him back on his stomach, and carefully pulls down the collar of his t-shirt. There’s no barcode. Not even a hint of a barcode. And that puzzles her even more. Because even when freshly lasered, it was always possible, if you looked right up close, to see the faint outlines of where Max’s, or Alec’s, or CeCe’s, or whomever’s, barcode would be.
Dean doesn’t have one. He doesn’t have one.
Cindy sits back, and touches his cheek, which is too warm to be healthy, and the light sheen of sweat which definitely isn’t a good sign. He’s twitching now, like he’s entering a dream, and Cindy doesn’t know what to do. “Jesus, boy. Who are you?”
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Date: 2010-01-01 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 11:15 am (UTC)