Happy birthday, Victoria! It's a joy sharing a fandom (fandoms) with you. Hope you have (had) a wonderful Tuesday!
Title: Then You'd Better Not Stay
A Supernatural/DCU crossover
Author:
dotficRating/pairing: Het, PG-13, Dean Winchester/Wonder Woman
Continuity: For her, after the JLU ep "Divided We Fall." For him, preseries, a few months before New Orleans.
Word count: 2,300
Disclaimer: Property of Eric Kripke, The CW, Bruce Timm, DC Comics, and Warner Brothers. *checks* Not me.
Written for
musesfool's birthday, at her request because I'm easy that way. Vic, I'm not sure this is exactly what you wanted -- once I put them together they started bossing me around.
a/n: Reference for Wonder Woman's background (and any other obscure canon shout-outs) is the animated
Timmverse. Title is from David Bowie. Thank you to
mclittlebitch for the beta read.
Summary: He's a hunter. She's an Amazon princess. Together, they slay dragons!
There have been seven deaths and three disappearances across four counties. His days and nights are a blurred cycle of drive-through fast food, mildewed motel rooms, the inside of the Impala, hours spent shoving his way through underbrush and woods.
Dean finally tracks the unhcegila to its lair, a warehouse just off the highway with its roof half-caved in, thick trees about to devour what's left of the building.
The beast is larger than he expects, comes lumbering outside and charges before he can go in after it. He fumbles in the darkness, his hand closing around the cool metal cylinder of the mini-blowtorch. Time to try fire against the sucker -- and the tail whips around, catches him off-guard like he's a green kid on his first hunt, someone who only found out yesterday that dragons were fucking real.
When he slams against the wall, it hurts like hell, hurts enough he sees bright silvery sparks. It's hard to breathe and as he hits the broken ground, he thinks that if he lives, Dad will kill him for being so stupid, and that Sam might be in line behind him. Not that he's spoke to Sam lately, not for two years.
Godammed Stanford.
There's a flare of light and a silhouette, moving fast in front of him, looks like a woman. She's pretty tall, like, really tall, with nice curves beneath her jeans and shirt, long legs ending in no, fuck you high-heeled boots. The unbelievable part is that she's holding up the unhcegila, its lower half gripped in her arms as it writhes and screams. Its long tongue flicks while the tail thuds down, sending up puffs of dirt and debris.
Last thing he sees before he passes out is how the woman lifts her slender arms and heaves the beast through the air. It strikes the wall with a force that shakes the whole building.
He wakes with the smooth hum of a good car around him, the sound not deep enough to be the Impala, his head throbbing. The digital readouts of a dashboard turn to a green blur, then refocus. It's a sweet, smooth ride. The air smells of clean leather.
There's a woman driving, dashboard glow casting up over her. Dark curly hair, long-limbed, wearing an expensive-looking but simply cut blouse, jeans, and boots.
"Where..." Forming the words makes his head hurt worse. He lifts his fingers, feels the dried blood on the side of his face. "Where're we going?"
"Hospital," she says, foot on the gas, eyes straight ahead.
"Uh-uh." He shuts his eyes, leans his head against the cool glass of the window, opens them again to watch her, how the light etches the bold structure of her cheekbones and nose. She looks like a statue, like in the lame-ass art history textbook Sam had his last year of high school. Or in the museums Dean secretly liked but let Sam think he had to drag him to, just to mess with him. "No hospitals."
"You're concussed." Her eyes slide his way, then back to the road. "You have several broken ribs."
"'s'okay," he mumbles. "No biggie." He shuts his eyes again, thinking he'll take a nap, just for thirty seconds or so. "Don't need hospital, I've dealt with this before."
She lets out a breath, a puff of exasperation.
He's not sure, because he's already halfway to the darkness again, but he thinks he hears her mutter typical in a really, really annoyed way. Which strikes him as funny because how many guys could she know who get trashed by monsters and refuse trips to the ER after?
When he wakes up again he's in a bed, big and soft, the air smelling of coffee, varnish, and dust. Not hospital smells. Dean sits up, fully clothed, boots off, blinking in the early morning light peeking through the curtains of what looks like a room in a pricier vacation cottage.
Leaning back comfortably into an armchair with her bare feet propped on a small table, she's reading something titled Ethics and Statecraft: The Moral Dimension of International Affairs.
Her feet are well-formed, perfectly arched, and he likes the curve of her chin, the way she tilts her head to one side as she reads. There's something wise but incredibly young about it. Wide, full mouth. Great boobs, they aren't huge but they'd be a pleasant handful.
She glances up, sees him watching her, tucks her blouse more thoroughly closed, then shuts the book, using the jacket flap as a bookmark.
"Are you feeling better?" she says in a business-like way.
"I'll live." He touches his side, winces at the soreness in his ribs -- he'll have to wrap that.
There's a bandage on his forehead, and the dried blood is gone from his face. Dean sits up, ignoring the jabs of pain. He's not at all sure how he got from her car into her bed. Or for that matter, now that he can think, how he got from the warehouse into her car. She must be stronger than she looks.
He reaches for his boots and shoves his sock-covered feet into them, needing to be up and moving, to be out and not at the mercy of a stranger -- okay, a very hot stranger with amazingly long legs and large brown eyes.
Dean only staggers a little on his way to the door -- he's fine, it's only a little headache and broken ribs, a cakewalk compared to some of the shit his body's been through. His duffel's by the door and he grabs it up, stifling the wince.
"Are you sure you're all right?"
"Five by five."
"Do you need a ride to somewhere? To your motel or back to your car?"
"Back to my car would be great." He grins, holds out his hand. She's several inches taller than him. "I'm Dean."
After a moment of hesitation, she takes his hand, and her grip is firm. "Audrey."
"Audrey." He draws it out, testing the name on his tongue.
The light's hitting her face and he's close enough to see now that she's wearing contacts.
She pulls away first.
By the time they reach the warehouse, the sun's high in the sky and his head feels better.
Dean throws his duffel into the back seat of the Impala, slams the door. She's already heading back to her car.
Even if Audrey doesn't look like she could throw a dragon, she'd hauled his sorry, bloodied ass into her car last night, back to her place, and then hauled his ass back out to the middle of nowhere.
He wonders if she's a hunter, but probably not with hands that smooth, the lack of scarring.
"Hey, Audrey."
She stops.
"Thanks," he says, meaning it down to his bones.
"You're welcome."
Her car drives off spitting up dust and gravel behind it.
He sticks around for a few days, making sure the beast isn't part of a clutch.
A body washes up on the shore of the lake, or rather, half a body, the remains horribly mauled. Dean sits on a park bench at a respectable distance, watching as a deputy pukes into a trash can and the local authorities demonstrate their utter cluelessness.
"There are more of them." The shadow falls over him; Dean looks up and sees Audrey.
Dean leans his elbows against the table behind him and tries to look like he's not startled. "No kidding."
"I've found signs of two more, and possibly three."
"You found tracks?"
"On the far shore."
"Show me?"
"So you going to tell me who you are? What a nice girl like you is doing stomping around in the mud with a guy like me?" Dean shoves a branch aside for her so it doesn't snap back into her face.
"I'm a concerned citizen," she says. Her eyebrows go up. "Like you are."
"Right."
She moves with a confident grace, never stumbling. As she kneels at the water's edge and points, he thinks he catches a flash of metal around her lower arms, peeking out beneath her sleeves. Bracelets. "There."
He steps up next to her, sees the prints.
From her shoulder bag, Audrey takes out a kit and efficiently sets to work taking a mold.
When they're done, he asks if she wants a beer, and she says yes.
It's after the third beer he realizes she hasn't once asked him who he is or why he was stomping around through the muddy underbrush looking for dragons.
He stops caring about that when they step outside, mountain summer night chilly and clear, and she pushes him against the broken stone wall outside the bar. Her mouth is tentative at first, her fingers lightly brushing against him, exploratory.
Dean runs his fingers over her shoulders, down her arms, under her jacket, keeping to her waist while she pushes her whole body against him. He opens her mouth with his tongue, and she tastes like the beer they've both been drinking and something fresh and remote that makes him think of the ocean.
They track down one of the unhcegila in someone's barn, its jowls red with the blood of the cow it just killed.
Audrey has no weapons. He thinks she'll stay back at the doorway where he leaves her but when the thing scents them and turns, lumbers forward with steps that shake the barn, she stands in its path like a hurricane can't knock her over.
"Shit." Dean swings the sword, thrusts into the creature's vulnerable point where the shoulder joins its chest, right where she'd told him.
It doesn't go down right away.
Audrey yanks him out of the reach of the thrashing tail, grabs the sword from him with more than a hint of impatience, and stabs it into the creature's mouth.
"Shit," Dean says again, as the dragon falls over. His words seem to be broken. "Shit, who the hell are you?" She opens her mouth to answer, and he holds up his hand. "Yeah, right, I know. Concerned citizen. Never mind."
When they're back in the Impala, before he turns on the ignition, she's tugging him over to the passenger side of the front seat, hands on either side of his face as she kisses him hard, moans softly in assent as his fingers move up under her blouse.
"If I find any mention of us in the tabloids I will have your entrails on a platter, understood?"
The tinted contacts have come out. She has blue eyes.
They go a little cold on him, don't-fuck-with-my-galaxy dangerous.
He can only nod wordlessly as the curly-haired wig comes off and she pulls the pins out of the neat bun at the base of her neck, revealing the tumble of long dark hair; but he's already gotten it, figured it out before she showed him, really. Because he doesn't live under a rock, no matter how much Sam's always teased him about not following the news.
Yeah, no, so her name's not really Audrey.
"You do this kind of thing often?" His voice catches a little as her tongue travels over his stomach. "Track down big scary monsters --" he slides his fingers down the curve of her back -- "and then fall into bed with the brutally hot guy who helped you kill them?"
"The monster part, yes, quite frequently" she says, and then her tongue moves lower -- god, yes. She pauses, looks up at him. "The other part, no."
"Well, why not?" he says indignantly.
"Because I usually prefer girls."
For a moment he falters, but then his hand moves down, finds a sweet spot, and she gasps, as he knew she would, because that always works.
He smirks at her. "What can I say. I'm exceptional."
As he tumbles out of the bed under the considerable force of her shove, he makes a note to self not to say things like that to a woman who could lift up a tanker truck.
Then she joins him on the floor and things go all incoherent for a while.
Another body is found, half mangled, in the foothills of the mountain.
After everyone's gone, Dean knocks out the officer on duty and then he and not-really-Audrey duck beneath the yellow police tape. He holds the flashlight while she takes measurements and photographs.
There are tracks all over. They match the mold she took at the lake, only smaller.
"Must be one of the young." She starts to put away the camera.
The tools she has are shiny new, ultra-compact, and probably cost a fortune. Given the situation, he's not surprised but still he wonders about her, wants to ask anyway.
"So...how'd you learn to do all that forensics stuff?"
"My last exception."
They find the creature's lair.
Dean hands her the sword, then stands back and watches her have at it.
In three days he has to be in Minnesota; Dad texts him about a poltergeist.
"What's next for you?" He pours maple syrup over his pancakes and bacon.
"I have duties." She finishes off her coffee. "This was only a sabbatical."
"Which you spent slaying dragons."
She shrugs at that, gathers her shoulder bag, then stands and looks down at him a moment. "There are many of us," she says, and puts her palm against the side of his face. "We're spread thin, but we are out there."
"Sure," he says, and doesn't think that sounds bitter, it's not as if they aren't used to doing this on their own, past the point of exhaustion and their resources.
"I could ask if..."
"No," he says sharply, then takes her hand, kisses her palm.
She leaves.
When he gets into the Impala a short while later, there's a small, flat object about the size of a quarter on the dashboard, a communicator of some kind, with a note in elegant, sloped handwriting that says just in case.
He turns the communicator over in his fingers before he drops it to the gravel. He presses his boot heel down onto it until he hears the casing crack.
~end