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grumkin_snarkStory Title: Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter Title: The Great Escape
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Summary: In the end, it’s a complete accident that gets Dean Winchester out of Hell.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,911
Disclaimer: Same stuff applies as in the Author’s Notes chapter. Oh, and unfortunately I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
From all he’d heard, Cindy’s a…an interesting person. She’s also definitely not a demon, he’d discovered with a healthy amount of relief; he knew she’d heard him mumble things in his duress, and so it would only be consistent if he kept doing it. So he’d decided to whisper Christo, with his eyes slitted infinitesimally, to see if she flinched. She didn’t. Although maybe she did peer over at him with a combination of He’s insane and pity. Dean despises people pitying him, but he’s supposed to be asleep, so.
Despite what Max—at least that’s what he’d learned from how Cindy addressed the other woman—and probably Cindy thought, Dean was somewhat conscious when Max had touched him. He’s hazy on how he acted, but he remembers what she did. Remembers the slightly unsure, but also pacifying fingers through his hair and on his face, not ceasing even though Dean’s damn positive he looks terrible.
Then she’d started humming, a tune he wasn’t familiar with, but one of those songs whose rhythm is hard to object to. She was a little off-key, as if she didn’t do anything of that sort very often, but he hadn’t really cared, to be honest. Sure, his muscles were coiled ready to spring, and his head was telling him that he didn’t know this woman so why the hell was he letting her practically pet him, but, God help him, he didn’t want her to stop.
It’d been so long since he’d actually had someone touch him so carefully and gently like that, making him feel like they wanted to take care of him—Christ, Dean’d just lost some of his manhood right there by thinking that—and he just wanted to revel in it, for only a few moments.
He’d been able to see a blurry outline of the woman, not enough to solidify details beyond that she was well-structured, but when he closed his eyes, he could pretend it was Mom and he’d just had some bad dream and she’d sing to make it all better. The illusion was far from perfect, but down in the Pit, Dean had had a lot of practice with conjuring such things in his head.
He’d gathered that Max’s intentions had been to get him to calm down and fall asleep again, but he was too wired and his blood was pumping too fast for that to really happen. Nevertheless, he surrendered to Max’s wishes, laid down with his head flat on the cushions, and allowed her to drape a blanket over him. It had felt uncomfortable to say the least, given that for the past hundreds and hundreds of years, the most caring he’d had was that one day where he’d not been tortured. He still didn’t know why, but it wasn’t like he was going to ask the bastards. Maybe they’d had a day-long huddle to come up with new techniques. That was probably it.
Max had then gone over to Cindy and said a few sentences that Dean had no idea the meaning of; they didn’t clarify the ones he’d heard vaguely before, that much was true. Manticore? Dean thought he’d fought one of those before…Athens, maybe? Barcodes? He didn’t think she was talking about the ones in supermarkets… Donors? Dean’s fake license says he’s an organ one, but he’s pretty sure that thing is gone… Transgenic? Genetic engineering, right? Dean’s never been much for that crap… Alec? Ben? Logan? Who the fuck are these people? And what were they saying about him being a friggin’ clone?!
Dean’s head had been starting to hurt more than it already was, and, truth be told, he was kind of glad when Max left. He had always liked silence. Oh, he loves his music, and the television, and the sounds the girls made when they…er, forget that last, but he also treasures the rare moments he gets of pure quiet, and for a few minutes after Max had hurried out, he was granted it.
He tried not to flinch or squirm when he felt Cindy sit across from him and stare, and even more when she removed his shoes—Woman, leave my fucking boots alone! he’d wanted to yell—and it was difficult, but he managed. He half-expected a person of her feistiness to go and throw a rave or something in the apartment, but she hadn’t. Instead, she’d sat nearly on top of him (all right, so maybe she’d just leaned against his shins, but that was almost the same thing, right?) and pulled out a book, of all things. He didn’t know which one, but she’d seemed engrossed in it, and was mainly quiet, so he didn’t complain.
He still made little mumbling noises every now and then to keep up the charade, but he was more fascinated with how…normal the chick seemed. If it were him, well, he’d shoot first and ask questions later—and he would’ve, if he hadn’t felt so freakin’ weak—and not embrace a full-on stranger like they’re lifelong friends, but then again, his day hadn’t exactly been standard, so he should’ve anticipated as much.
Dean had only had a blessed forty-five or so minutes of this silence before he heard the sashaying footsteps that he imagined Max would make. As his lack of luck would have it, Cindy closes her book, gets off of the couch, and answers the door. At least she’s considerate enough to speak in undertones; he appreciates it.
Dean doesn’t possess any powers, he’s not in tune with any ESP shit, but Max is emanating such tension that he can sense it, and he knows he’s in for a whopper of an inadvertent eavesdropping. (Really, Max and Cindy think the latter’s bedroom cuts off sound? As if.)
And he’s right. The minute he hears Max say Number forty-four, Cin in that tired voice, and the rustle of a lot of papers, Dean gets the unwelcome feeling that he is about to hear something about himself that he isn’t proud of. Then, of course Cindy needs Max to spell everything out for her, to relay it to Dean’s not-sleeping form.
He winces as Max discloses all his supposed crimes to Cindy, and can imagine both of their faces: they’re housing who they think is a murderer and psychopath, and oh God what are they going to do with him? Dean’s pretty sure they have no idea he’s a hunter, and that his “crimes” helped the very public who wanted—and possibly still want—to skewer him, but he can’t help but hold it against them, just a bit.
Dean clenches his jaw and opens his eyes. He’s fucking sick and tired of being convicted of felonies committed by a shapeshifter, or werewolf, or spirit, or wendigo, or dirty cop, or what the fuck ever else, and he’s not going to stay around and listen to Max and Cindy try and think how much they noticed when Dean was on the news. Because that’s what he’s deducing: Max is, after all, blithely asking Cindy if she remembers those guys that everyone went on about how freakish and cultish their crimes were, and that freakin’ Sam and Dean were the ones involved in Devil worship and black magic and shit like that.
Well, screw it, Dean’s not going to take it. It’s not because he’s being a pansy ass and doesn’t want to hear himself being blacklisted—he couldn’t care less about what people think of him, and besides, it’s Sam’s business to be a wuss. Dean won’t take it because he doesn’t want to be feared and shunned. Not by these people, anyhow. They’re not supernatural, and he’s almost certain they’re not trying to kill him just yet, and he won’t just throw that away. They haven’t done anything to him so far, and although he’d like nothing more than to have the upper hand in this, to have a straight flush and not a fucking high card like he has now, he won’t have them accuse him based off of prejudiced and presumptuous reports.
So he does what he’s been trained to do since the age of four. He escapes. He stifles his pain and the accompanying want to groan in agony, and stands up, leaving the blanket haphazard on the couch. He brushes a hand through his hair subconsciously and wishes he had his pendant, but there’s no use now ruminating on a piece of jewelry, even if it’s practically a part of him, even if it’s the only tangible connection he has to Sam.
A careful glance at where Cindy and Max’s voices are muffled through the wooden door, and Dean shrugs on his boots, soundlessly making his way over to the window. It’s sealed shut with mold and congealed something—which is nasty, but he doesn’t have time to question it—so he reaches into his jeans pocket, both relieved and shocked to find his pocketknife is still there. Flipping it open like greeting an old friend, he severs the paint easily and pulls up the window. It creaks a little, but Max and Cindy don’t notice.
With gracefulness most people wouldn’t expect from a guy who looks like Dean, he steps out onto the scaffolding, edging his way sideways so he’s out of sight of Cindy’s apartment window. Then he leans over the side, trying to see if there’s a ladder on the framework, but there’s not. Sighing, and hoping his arm muscles aren’t completely useless, he crouches and grips onto the freezing metal, and then drops, landing very ungracefully on the level below, but alive.
Knowing he has to do this five more times, Dean prepares himself, and agonizingly climbs his way down the building, thinking he’s way fucking cooler than Peter Parker, and it’s already common knowledge he’s Batman, so there. Plus, neither of those guys went to Hell, so point for Dean for surviving. (Ish, he thinks with a shuddering flashback.)
By the time he gets to the bottom of the scaffolding, he’s breathing as hard as when he’d awakened to find Sam gone just gone, and hadn’t found him until a solid freakin’ week later. (He’s still pissed he didn’t pick up on the fact that Sam was full-on possessed right away, but that’s really neither here nor there.)
He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go from here; he hadn’t thought anything through farther than just needing to get out of Cindy’s apartment. A tiny part of him is wishing he’d stayed, because now that he’s out, the colors around him seem too bright, too saturated, like a camera lens with overloaded contrast. The sky, which Dean had so been ecstatic to see—and, okay, he still is—magnifies the soggy light of the sun, the rays laser-focused through the water droplets.
His pupils contract as he squints against the whole environment, and he looks at the ground, at the worn leather of his boots. That’s a little better. Still pondering his unfavorable position, Dean feels a half-familiar sensation in his stomach, a sort of somersaulting, vocal awareness. It takes him more than a few seconds to realize what should have been like first nature to him: hunger.
Dean almost musters enough of himself to laugh at that. It’s sometimes fuzzy, his life from before Hell, but he remembers vividly how much he used to just eat, all those caramels and taquitos and triple hamburgers and greasy pizza, not to mention the hundreds of beers, purple nurples (he never did find out what those were…), Backdrafts, all of it.
He supposes he should also remember the feeling from when he was Down Under, given that the demons had thought it’d be super fun to make him have basic bodily needs for a while but deprive him of them. Those decades where every day felt like he hadn’t eaten in sixty…well, Dean never accused them of not knowing things about their prisoners, his black hole of an appetite falling neatly into that category. He’s not even going to go into the fact that, in all those years, he hadn’t had sex once. Not that he would’ve, considering supernatural lovers were Sam’s gig, but, come on, it’s the principle of the thing.
Max sits down on the old, worn couch and presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, making her black vision explode with stars for a couple seconds. “This is so not good,” she states redundantly.
“Take a breath, sugar,” Original Cindy placates, handing Max a cup of warm coffee. “Mystery Man ain’t your responsibility.”
“Of course he is!” Max objects hotly. “Cin, he’s walkin’ around with Ben and Alec’s face and mumbling about freaking Hell, whatever the fuck any of that means, he practically broke my wrist back there, and now he’s missing. From your apartment, the one you led him into because he was so confused he made Sketchy riding high sound normal.”
Cindy lets this slide, even the bit about Sketchy, although in no other way could she really compare the two guys. Sitting down next to Max, she puts an arm around her shoulder, patting her friend gently.
“Come on, boo,” she says softly, nudging Max with her knee. “What are you doin’? Why you jus’ sittin’ ’round here feelin’ sorry for yo’self? ’S not the Max Guevara I know.”
Max looks over at Cindy, and for a moment simply appears like she thinks the other woman’s certifiably nuts, but then her face relaxes a bit, and she even grants Cindy a small smile. “You’re right,” she admits, abruptly standing up off of the couch. “Can’t be that hard to find him, I mean, he’s—”
She cuts off her words mid-sentence, her anxious expression replaced with dismalness again. “What is it?” Cindy asks.
“I don’t know anything about the guy,” Max says, looking like she wants to sit back down next to Cindy.
“He’s hot boy and Ben’s clone, ain’t he?” Cindy asks, and Max nods, even though the “clone” part of it she isn’t sure on. “Well then, he’ll like the same places, won’ he?”
Max shrugs. “I dunno,” she says. “I really don’t know. I mean, it’s not like he was awake enough to tell us anything about himself, and no one we know remembers much about him from when he was hot news except for kind of Logan. And who knows how truthful any of that information was. I got nothing, Cindy.”
“You talk to Alec yet?” Cindy inquires, watching Max pace around the small apartment.
Max scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Oh yeah, that would go over well,” she says sarcastically. “‘Hey Alec, guess what? You got another lookalike, an Ordinary this time! But don’t worry, ’cause he’s a serial killer Ordinary. Don’t think he’s crazy, but he could be. And by the way, I don’t suppose you know much about his murder spree back in ’08?’ No way, Cindy. Alec would think I’ve lost my mind.”
Cindy’s eyebrows rise expectantly. “Since when d’you care ’bout what Alec thinks of you?”
“I don’t,” Max objects instantly. “I just…it’s just too much. We’ve barely got Terminal City functional, let alone livable, hardly got a chain of command intact, and now I gotta add this? I don’t want to bring Alec into it. Can you just go with me on this? Please?”
Cindy sighs heavily, not seeing virtually any merit in what Max is proposing, but knowing her friend isn’t going to change her mind. “Aiight, Max, I got your back.”
“Thanks.”
“So, what d’you want to do?” Cindy asks, taking control of the situation. “You wanna get ’im back or what?”
Max levels her with a glare. “No, I want to just let him roam around Seattle,” she answers sarcastically. “He can’t’ve gotten far, right? We can still find him.”
Cindy looks at Max skeptically. “You sure?” she asks, then at Max’s silent threat of bodily harm, hastily continues, “Just sayin’. But if you think there’s a way to track him…”
Max sighs. “You’re right,” she accedes. “Guess we’ll have to do it the hard way.”
Despite her impatience about everything, Max takes out her cell phone to call Logan again, see if he found anything else; Cindy is relegated to using her better people skills—read: better human perception abilities than Max—to try and see if she can think of where Dean could go.
Sighing, Cindy walks over to her open window. Sticking her head out, she studies the street left and right, halfheartedly given that she sincerely doubts Dean would have just hung out. Like she’d expected, there’s no sight of him, no sign that he’d even been there except for some of the dirt on the scaffolding being smudged off in the shape of fingers. Which isn’t surprising; Cindy had guessed as much that he’d escape down that way. Still, regardless of her dubiety of Dean’s path, she still wishes he would be just leaning against the wall like a smartass idiot.
So, instead of locating him easily, Cindy sits down on the couch that Dean had occupied not but ten minutes ago, staring at the stucco wall across from her. For the first time in a long time, Cindy finds herself at a complete loss. Sometimes she’s a little off-centered, but most of the time, she’s pretty okay with even a totally screwed up situation. But this time…well. She can honestly, and without too much pride lost, say that she has no fucking idea what to do.
She hasn’t had any experience with things like this. And to add to that, Max is practically expecting her to know Dean inside and out. When, in actuality, Max knows more than she does. And sure, Cindy’s curious as hell, but now Dean’s gone, and she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to tell her friend, who has a very freaky fascination with the man. Cindy doesn’t swing that way, and even though she thinks Dean’s got the deep end of the gene pool going for him, she’s not quite certain the dude’s not in the shallow end on the mental front.
She won’t tell Max this, of course. She’s already recognizing the signs: Dean’s becoming Max’s next abandoned puppy. Sure, Cindy thinks Max very philanthropic in that regard, but her decisions to take in almost any transgenic—starting with Joshua, then expanding to Alec…then Mole…then everyone else—aren’t ignorable. Now, the way she’s agitated over Dean’s disappearance, not to mention the lengths to which she went to find out barebones details that just ended up confusing the whole thing even more kind of worries Cindy. And yeah, fine, she wants to get Dean back, if nothing else than because she’s inquisitive, but she’s just not sure she wants to go as far as she knows Max intends to.
But, she hasn’t been best friends with Max for this long without living with that particular—and for the most part not bad—trait of hers. (And, purely selfishly, she kinda wants to have bragging rights just in case she ever gets into an argument with someone over who’s led the cooler life. That person, or Cindy, who will have helped find a possibly ex-half of a brother con man team who quite possibly died thirteen years ago, but has now reappeared and is mumbling about having spent some time in Hell. Add to that Dean’s undeniable sex appeal, and she’s pretty sure she’d win.)
It’s then that Cindy feels her brain has lit the proverbial lightbulb. “Max!” she calls into the apartment. A moment later—and quickly enough to where Cindy’s wondering if she hadn’t blurred—her friend comes into the room, her cell phone still in hand and Logan’s slightly muted voice wondering what happened.
“What?” Max asks, the cell phone obviously already forgotten.
“I think I know where to find Dean.”
“Where?” Max asks, more urgently and now completely ignoring Logan’s continued rumblings.
Cindy looks awkward for a minute, realizing that she probably should have had a contingency plan, or at least figured out a less blunt way to put her suggestion. “Um…” she starts out eloquently, “Sam’s?”
Max stares at her, a small frown between her eyebrows. “Sam?” she repeats, like she was asked to solve pi. “As in Sam Winchester?”
“No, Uncle Sam,” Cindy retorts facetiously. “Yeah, sugar, Sam Winchester. Deano’s brother.”
“Okay…one tiny problem with that, Cin,” Max says slowly, regarding Cindy like she’s lost one too many brain cells. Cindy looks right back, standing her ground. “We don’t know where Sam is. And how the hell did you come up with that Dean would even be there?”
Original Cindy McEachin isn’t a fool. Anyone can see that. She’s used to Max’s questioning in lots of things, but when Cindy sets her mind to something, she fucking sets her mind to it. “Come on, girl,” Cindy says curtly. “Sam is Dean’s bro, ain’t he? I mean, wasn’t finding yo’ brothers and sisters the first thing you tried to do? Poor dude’s prob’ly lookin’ everywhere for the guy.”
Max purses her full lips at her friend, hands on her hips, but doesn’t say anything for a while, Cindy almost literally watching the wheels in her hyperdrive mind turning. “All right, maybe you got a point,” she concedes, sitting down on the coffee table. After all, it is what she did. And she doesn’t know Dean very well at all, but she’s gathered that he’s persistent as all hell. “But how are we supposed to find Sam? We don’t even know if he’s alive. Or…you know…sane.”
Cindy can see it in the suddenly darkened tint of Max’s eyes that her girl’s thinking of Ben, thinking of how her arguably favorite brother’s brain just stopped functioning rationally. How she’d had to kill him. Cindy has a gut feeling that that might just be a reason she’s even going along with Cindy’s idea; more than that, Cindy knows her idea is a damn good one. Though Max does have a point: how would they find him?
“Well…” Cindy begins, her own thoughts circulating and remembering previous conversations. “Why don’t we ask yo’ boy?”
“Alec?”
Cindy raises an eyebrow, before correcting, “No, Logan.”
“How could Logan help?” Max inquires curiously.
“He jacked those databases, right? The cops? And the papers?” Cindy asks rhetorically. Max nods. “Why don’t he jus’ look at that weird shit’s been happening the past years? Even if Dean was gone, somethin’ tells me his brother wouldn’t go down quiet.”
Max processes this, and then a small, sad smile comes over her face. Because the thing is, it’s exactly what a sibling would do. Granted, Max doubts her situation was anything resembling whatever Sam and Dean Winchester’s was (for which she doesn’t even have the vaguest idea), but still. Revenge, after looking for her siblings, was the first thing on her mind. She knows not one thing about Sam’s personality, but if he’s got half the care for Dean that she has for her siblings, then Cindy’s suggestion has a whole lot more weight.
“Okay,” Max agrees, standing up with conviction now that she has a clear warpath. “Let’s go find Sam Winchester.”
Next
Chapter Title: The Great Escape
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Summary: In the end, it’s a complete accident that gets Dean Winchester out of Hell.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,911
Disclaimer: Same stuff applies as in the Author’s Notes chapter. Oh, and unfortunately I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter VI: The Great Escape
Dean’s been up for a while, more or less ever since Max left Cindy’s apartment, but he’s an expert at faking, whether it’s death, or sleep, or whatever. He wants to be able to really sleep, to dream of things not godawful, but he’d rather be deprived of rest than experience another nightmare. So he waits, and he listens.Chapter VI: The Great Escape
From all he’d heard, Cindy’s a…an interesting person. She’s also definitely not a demon, he’d discovered with a healthy amount of relief; he knew she’d heard him mumble things in his duress, and so it would only be consistent if he kept doing it. So he’d decided to whisper Christo, with his eyes slitted infinitesimally, to see if she flinched. She didn’t. Although maybe she did peer over at him with a combination of He’s insane and pity. Dean despises people pitying him, but he’s supposed to be asleep, so.
Despite what Max—at least that’s what he’d learned from how Cindy addressed the other woman—and probably Cindy thought, Dean was somewhat conscious when Max had touched him. He’s hazy on how he acted, but he remembers what she did. Remembers the slightly unsure, but also pacifying fingers through his hair and on his face, not ceasing even though Dean’s damn positive he looks terrible.
Then she’d started humming, a tune he wasn’t familiar with, but one of those songs whose rhythm is hard to object to. She was a little off-key, as if she didn’t do anything of that sort very often, but he hadn’t really cared, to be honest. Sure, his muscles were coiled ready to spring, and his head was telling him that he didn’t know this woman so why the hell was he letting her practically pet him, but, God help him, he didn’t want her to stop.
It’d been so long since he’d actually had someone touch him so carefully and gently like that, making him feel like they wanted to take care of him—Christ, Dean’d just lost some of his manhood right there by thinking that—and he just wanted to revel in it, for only a few moments.
He’d been able to see a blurry outline of the woman, not enough to solidify details beyond that she was well-structured, but when he closed his eyes, he could pretend it was Mom and he’d just had some bad dream and she’d sing to make it all better. The illusion was far from perfect, but down in the Pit, Dean had had a lot of practice with conjuring such things in his head.
He’d gathered that Max’s intentions had been to get him to calm down and fall asleep again, but he was too wired and his blood was pumping too fast for that to really happen. Nevertheless, he surrendered to Max’s wishes, laid down with his head flat on the cushions, and allowed her to drape a blanket over him. It had felt uncomfortable to say the least, given that for the past hundreds and hundreds of years, the most caring he’d had was that one day where he’d not been tortured. He still didn’t know why, but it wasn’t like he was going to ask the bastards. Maybe they’d had a day-long huddle to come up with new techniques. That was probably it.
Max had then gone over to Cindy and said a few sentences that Dean had no idea the meaning of; they didn’t clarify the ones he’d heard vaguely before, that much was true. Manticore? Dean thought he’d fought one of those before…Athens, maybe? Barcodes? He didn’t think she was talking about the ones in supermarkets… Donors? Dean’s fake license says he’s an organ one, but he’s pretty sure that thing is gone… Transgenic? Genetic engineering, right? Dean’s never been much for that crap… Alec? Ben? Logan? Who the fuck are these people? And what were they saying about him being a friggin’ clone?!
Dean’s head had been starting to hurt more than it already was, and, truth be told, he was kind of glad when Max left. He had always liked silence. Oh, he loves his music, and the television, and the sounds the girls made when they…er, forget that last, but he also treasures the rare moments he gets of pure quiet, and for a few minutes after Max had hurried out, he was granted it.
He tried not to flinch or squirm when he felt Cindy sit across from him and stare, and even more when she removed his shoes—Woman, leave my fucking boots alone! he’d wanted to yell—and it was difficult, but he managed. He half-expected a person of her feistiness to go and throw a rave or something in the apartment, but she hadn’t. Instead, she’d sat nearly on top of him (all right, so maybe she’d just leaned against his shins, but that was almost the same thing, right?) and pulled out a book, of all things. He didn’t know which one, but she’d seemed engrossed in it, and was mainly quiet, so he didn’t complain.
He still made little mumbling noises every now and then to keep up the charade, but he was more fascinated with how…normal the chick seemed. If it were him, well, he’d shoot first and ask questions later—and he would’ve, if he hadn’t felt so freakin’ weak—and not embrace a full-on stranger like they’re lifelong friends, but then again, his day hadn’t exactly been standard, so he should’ve anticipated as much.
Dean had only had a blessed forty-five or so minutes of this silence before he heard the sashaying footsteps that he imagined Max would make. As his lack of luck would have it, Cindy closes her book, gets off of the couch, and answers the door. At least she’s considerate enough to speak in undertones; he appreciates it.
Dean doesn’t possess any powers, he’s not in tune with any ESP shit, but Max is emanating such tension that he can sense it, and he knows he’s in for a whopper of an inadvertent eavesdropping. (Really, Max and Cindy think the latter’s bedroom cuts off sound? As if.)
And he’s right. The minute he hears Max say Number forty-four, Cin in that tired voice, and the rustle of a lot of papers, Dean gets the unwelcome feeling that he is about to hear something about himself that he isn’t proud of. Then, of course Cindy needs Max to spell everything out for her, to relay it to Dean’s not-sleeping form.
He winces as Max discloses all his supposed crimes to Cindy, and can imagine both of their faces: they’re housing who they think is a murderer and psychopath, and oh God what are they going to do with him? Dean’s pretty sure they have no idea he’s a hunter, and that his “crimes” helped the very public who wanted—and possibly still want—to skewer him, but he can’t help but hold it against them, just a bit.
Dean clenches his jaw and opens his eyes. He’s fucking sick and tired of being convicted of felonies committed by a shapeshifter, or werewolf, or spirit, or wendigo, or dirty cop, or what the fuck ever else, and he’s not going to stay around and listen to Max and Cindy try and think how much they noticed when Dean was on the news. Because that’s what he’s deducing: Max is, after all, blithely asking Cindy if she remembers those guys that everyone went on about how freakish and cultish their crimes were, and that freakin’ Sam and Dean were the ones involved in Devil worship and black magic and shit like that.
Well, screw it, Dean’s not going to take it. It’s not because he’s being a pansy ass and doesn’t want to hear himself being blacklisted—he couldn’t care less about what people think of him, and besides, it’s Sam’s business to be a wuss. Dean won’t take it because he doesn’t want to be feared and shunned. Not by these people, anyhow. They’re not supernatural, and he’s almost certain they’re not trying to kill him just yet, and he won’t just throw that away. They haven’t done anything to him so far, and although he’d like nothing more than to have the upper hand in this, to have a straight flush and not a fucking high card like he has now, he won’t have them accuse him based off of prejudiced and presumptuous reports.
So he does what he’s been trained to do since the age of four. He escapes. He stifles his pain and the accompanying want to groan in agony, and stands up, leaving the blanket haphazard on the couch. He brushes a hand through his hair subconsciously and wishes he had his pendant, but there’s no use now ruminating on a piece of jewelry, even if it’s practically a part of him, even if it’s the only tangible connection he has to Sam.
A careful glance at where Cindy and Max’s voices are muffled through the wooden door, and Dean shrugs on his boots, soundlessly making his way over to the window. It’s sealed shut with mold and congealed something—which is nasty, but he doesn’t have time to question it—so he reaches into his jeans pocket, both relieved and shocked to find his pocketknife is still there. Flipping it open like greeting an old friend, he severs the paint easily and pulls up the window. It creaks a little, but Max and Cindy don’t notice.
With gracefulness most people wouldn’t expect from a guy who looks like Dean, he steps out onto the scaffolding, edging his way sideways so he’s out of sight of Cindy’s apartment window. Then he leans over the side, trying to see if there’s a ladder on the framework, but there’s not. Sighing, and hoping his arm muscles aren’t completely useless, he crouches and grips onto the freezing metal, and then drops, landing very ungracefully on the level below, but alive.
Knowing he has to do this five more times, Dean prepares himself, and agonizingly climbs his way down the building, thinking he’s way fucking cooler than Peter Parker, and it’s already common knowledge he’s Batman, so there. Plus, neither of those guys went to Hell, so point for Dean for surviving. (Ish, he thinks with a shuddering flashback.)
By the time he gets to the bottom of the scaffolding, he’s breathing as hard as when he’d awakened to find Sam gone just gone, and hadn’t found him until a solid freakin’ week later. (He’s still pissed he didn’t pick up on the fact that Sam was full-on possessed right away, but that’s really neither here nor there.)
He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go from here; he hadn’t thought anything through farther than just needing to get out of Cindy’s apartment. A tiny part of him is wishing he’d stayed, because now that he’s out, the colors around him seem too bright, too saturated, like a camera lens with overloaded contrast. The sky, which Dean had so been ecstatic to see—and, okay, he still is—magnifies the soggy light of the sun, the rays laser-focused through the water droplets.
His pupils contract as he squints against the whole environment, and he looks at the ground, at the worn leather of his boots. That’s a little better. Still pondering his unfavorable position, Dean feels a half-familiar sensation in his stomach, a sort of somersaulting, vocal awareness. It takes him more than a few seconds to realize what should have been like first nature to him: hunger.
Dean almost musters enough of himself to laugh at that. It’s sometimes fuzzy, his life from before Hell, but he remembers vividly how much he used to just eat, all those caramels and taquitos and triple hamburgers and greasy pizza, not to mention the hundreds of beers, purple nurples (he never did find out what those were…), Backdrafts, all of it.
He supposes he should also remember the feeling from when he was Down Under, given that the demons had thought it’d be super fun to make him have basic bodily needs for a while but deprive him of them. Those decades where every day felt like he hadn’t eaten in sixty…well, Dean never accused them of not knowing things about their prisoners, his black hole of an appetite falling neatly into that category. He’s not even going to go into the fact that, in all those years, he hadn’t had sex once. Not that he would’ve, considering supernatural lovers were Sam’s gig, but, come on, it’s the principle of the thing.
“Take a breath, sugar,” Original Cindy placates, handing Max a cup of warm coffee. “Mystery Man ain’t your responsibility.”
“Of course he is!” Max objects hotly. “Cin, he’s walkin’ around with Ben and Alec’s face and mumbling about freaking Hell, whatever the fuck any of that means, he practically broke my wrist back there, and now he’s missing. From your apartment, the one you led him into because he was so confused he made Sketchy riding high sound normal.”
Cindy lets this slide, even the bit about Sketchy, although in no other way could she really compare the two guys. Sitting down next to Max, she puts an arm around her shoulder, patting her friend gently.
“Come on, boo,” she says softly, nudging Max with her knee. “What are you doin’? Why you jus’ sittin’ ’round here feelin’ sorry for yo’self? ’S not the Max Guevara I know.”
Max looks over at Cindy, and for a moment simply appears like she thinks the other woman’s certifiably nuts, but then her face relaxes a bit, and she even grants Cindy a small smile. “You’re right,” she admits, abruptly standing up off of the couch. “Can’t be that hard to find him, I mean, he’s—”
She cuts off her words mid-sentence, her anxious expression replaced with dismalness again. “What is it?” Cindy asks.
“I don’t know anything about the guy,” Max says, looking like she wants to sit back down next to Cindy.
“He’s hot boy and Ben’s clone, ain’t he?” Cindy asks, and Max nods, even though the “clone” part of it she isn’t sure on. “Well then, he’ll like the same places, won’ he?”
Max shrugs. “I dunno,” she says. “I really don’t know. I mean, it’s not like he was awake enough to tell us anything about himself, and no one we know remembers much about him from when he was hot news except for kind of Logan. And who knows how truthful any of that information was. I got nothing, Cindy.”
“You talk to Alec yet?” Cindy inquires, watching Max pace around the small apartment.
Max scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Oh yeah, that would go over well,” she says sarcastically. “‘Hey Alec, guess what? You got another lookalike, an Ordinary this time! But don’t worry, ’cause he’s a serial killer Ordinary. Don’t think he’s crazy, but he could be. And by the way, I don’t suppose you know much about his murder spree back in ’08?’ No way, Cindy. Alec would think I’ve lost my mind.”
Cindy’s eyebrows rise expectantly. “Since when d’you care ’bout what Alec thinks of you?”
“I don’t,” Max objects instantly. “I just…it’s just too much. We’ve barely got Terminal City functional, let alone livable, hardly got a chain of command intact, and now I gotta add this? I don’t want to bring Alec into it. Can you just go with me on this? Please?”
Cindy sighs heavily, not seeing virtually any merit in what Max is proposing, but knowing her friend isn’t going to change her mind. “Aiight, Max, I got your back.”
“Thanks.”
“So, what d’you want to do?” Cindy asks, taking control of the situation. “You wanna get ’im back or what?”
Max levels her with a glare. “No, I want to just let him roam around Seattle,” she answers sarcastically. “He can’t’ve gotten far, right? We can still find him.”
Cindy looks at Max skeptically. “You sure?” she asks, then at Max’s silent threat of bodily harm, hastily continues, “Just sayin’. But if you think there’s a way to track him…”
Max sighs. “You’re right,” she accedes. “Guess we’ll have to do it the hard way.”
Sighing, Cindy walks over to her open window. Sticking her head out, she studies the street left and right, halfheartedly given that she sincerely doubts Dean would have just hung out. Like she’d expected, there’s no sight of him, no sign that he’d even been there except for some of the dirt on the scaffolding being smudged off in the shape of fingers. Which isn’t surprising; Cindy had guessed as much that he’d escape down that way. Still, regardless of her dubiety of Dean’s path, she still wishes he would be just leaning against the wall like a smartass idiot.
So, instead of locating him easily, Cindy sits down on the couch that Dean had occupied not but ten minutes ago, staring at the stucco wall across from her. For the first time in a long time, Cindy finds herself at a complete loss. Sometimes she’s a little off-centered, but most of the time, she’s pretty okay with even a totally screwed up situation. But this time…well. She can honestly, and without too much pride lost, say that she has no fucking idea what to do.
She hasn’t had any experience with things like this. And to add to that, Max is practically expecting her to know Dean inside and out. When, in actuality, Max knows more than she does. And sure, Cindy’s curious as hell, but now Dean’s gone, and she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to tell her friend, who has a very freaky fascination with the man. Cindy doesn’t swing that way, and even though she thinks Dean’s got the deep end of the gene pool going for him, she’s not quite certain the dude’s not in the shallow end on the mental front.
She won’t tell Max this, of course. She’s already recognizing the signs: Dean’s becoming Max’s next abandoned puppy. Sure, Cindy thinks Max very philanthropic in that regard, but her decisions to take in almost any transgenic—starting with Joshua, then expanding to Alec…then Mole…then everyone else—aren’t ignorable. Now, the way she’s agitated over Dean’s disappearance, not to mention the lengths to which she went to find out barebones details that just ended up confusing the whole thing even more kind of worries Cindy. And yeah, fine, she wants to get Dean back, if nothing else than because she’s inquisitive, but she’s just not sure she wants to go as far as she knows Max intends to.
But, she hasn’t been best friends with Max for this long without living with that particular—and for the most part not bad—trait of hers. (And, purely selfishly, she kinda wants to have bragging rights just in case she ever gets into an argument with someone over who’s led the cooler life. That person, or Cindy, who will have helped find a possibly ex-half of a brother con man team who quite possibly died thirteen years ago, but has now reappeared and is mumbling about having spent some time in Hell. Add to that Dean’s undeniable sex appeal, and she’s pretty sure she’d win.)
It’s then that Cindy feels her brain has lit the proverbial lightbulb. “Max!” she calls into the apartment. A moment later—and quickly enough to where Cindy’s wondering if she hadn’t blurred—her friend comes into the room, her cell phone still in hand and Logan’s slightly muted voice wondering what happened.
“What?” Max asks, the cell phone obviously already forgotten.
“I think I know where to find Dean.”
“Where?” Max asks, more urgently and now completely ignoring Logan’s continued rumblings.
Cindy looks awkward for a minute, realizing that she probably should have had a contingency plan, or at least figured out a less blunt way to put her suggestion. “Um…” she starts out eloquently, “Sam’s?”
Max stares at her, a small frown between her eyebrows. “Sam?” she repeats, like she was asked to solve pi. “As in Sam Winchester?”
“No, Uncle Sam,” Cindy retorts facetiously. “Yeah, sugar, Sam Winchester. Deano’s brother.”
“Okay…one tiny problem with that, Cin,” Max says slowly, regarding Cindy like she’s lost one too many brain cells. Cindy looks right back, standing her ground. “We don’t know where Sam is. And how the hell did you come up with that Dean would even be there?”
Original Cindy McEachin isn’t a fool. Anyone can see that. She’s used to Max’s questioning in lots of things, but when Cindy sets her mind to something, she fucking sets her mind to it. “Come on, girl,” Cindy says curtly. “Sam is Dean’s bro, ain’t he? I mean, wasn’t finding yo’ brothers and sisters the first thing you tried to do? Poor dude’s prob’ly lookin’ everywhere for the guy.”
Max purses her full lips at her friend, hands on her hips, but doesn’t say anything for a while, Cindy almost literally watching the wheels in her hyperdrive mind turning. “All right, maybe you got a point,” she concedes, sitting down on the coffee table. After all, it is what she did. And she doesn’t know Dean very well at all, but she’s gathered that he’s persistent as all hell. “But how are we supposed to find Sam? We don’t even know if he’s alive. Or…you know…sane.”
Cindy can see it in the suddenly darkened tint of Max’s eyes that her girl’s thinking of Ben, thinking of how her arguably favorite brother’s brain just stopped functioning rationally. How she’d had to kill him. Cindy has a gut feeling that that might just be a reason she’s even going along with Cindy’s idea; more than that, Cindy knows her idea is a damn good one. Though Max does have a point: how would they find him?
“Well…” Cindy begins, her own thoughts circulating and remembering previous conversations. “Why don’t we ask yo’ boy?”
“Alec?”
Cindy raises an eyebrow, before correcting, “No, Logan.”
“How could Logan help?” Max inquires curiously.
“He jacked those databases, right? The cops? And the papers?” Cindy asks rhetorically. Max nods. “Why don’t he jus’ look at that weird shit’s been happening the past years? Even if Dean was gone, somethin’ tells me his brother wouldn’t go down quiet.”
Max processes this, and then a small, sad smile comes over her face. Because the thing is, it’s exactly what a sibling would do. Granted, Max doubts her situation was anything resembling whatever Sam and Dean Winchester’s was (for which she doesn’t even have the vaguest idea), but still. Revenge, after looking for her siblings, was the first thing on her mind. She knows not one thing about Sam’s personality, but if he’s got half the care for Dean that she has for her siblings, then Cindy’s suggestion has a whole lot more weight.
“Okay,” Max agrees, standing up with conviction now that she has a clear warpath. “Let’s go find Sam Winchester.”
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Date: 2010-01-01 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-05 09:39 am (UTC)