Supernatural: Old Dogs, New Tricks
Title: Old Dogs, New Tricks
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean, Bela
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: PG-13 for language.
Word Count: 1,949
Author’s Note: What can I say, I really Love hating this character and was, despite my own better judgment, really sad to see her go. This was written for tamingthemuse prompt # 158 - Barbeque which is the worst prompt in the history of mankind. Spoilers up to 4x06. Beta’d by the flawless wutendeskind.
Summary: Post-Apocalypse. Sam and Dean are reunited with Bela…except now she’s an entirely different kind of problem.
Fanfiction Link: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5267608/1/Old_Dogs_New_Tricks
Dean stepped cautiously. He wasn’t used to being this wound up on hunts, but this demon they were after was crafty as all hell, which made him think it was one of the few high-ranking demons that had managed to survive the last brutal battles of the Apocalypse. After twelve days of playing cat and mouse-and sometimes feeling that he was the mouse-Dean was not taking any chances. He heard Sam behind him: breathing a little too loudly, stepping a little too easy. Sam was always less tense when they were hunting demons. It was just one of the things from before Lucifer’s rise and fall that Dean did not like to think about. If he had his way, Sam would stay behind at the motel on these hunts, safe from the demons or rather, safe from the uneasy fact that they couldn’t hurt him.
“I think we should split up.”
“What? With a nasty case like this? That’s insane.”
“She’ll take us both at once without a problem, especially if she’s as strong as you think she is. If we split up, there’s a chance we can surprise her.”
“How do you know it’s a she?” Dean asked.
Sam made an “I’m sorry” face that gave Dean the obvious answer. He never would have asked that question if he’d taken more than two seconds to think about it. He tried to shake the image of Sam with blacked out eyes clear from his mind.
“Right, yeah, never mind.”
In the end Sam had won out. Like it or not, he was chillingly effective at hunting demons.
“Just promise, if you find her first you’ll wait for-“
“I’ll wait for you and the knife, Dean. You need to trust me.”
Dean nodded. He did trust his brother, with everything else. Too many mistakes had come from good intentions, however, and Dean wasn’t so sure that if faced with letting the demon escape and using the powers he’d promised to never use again, Sam would be able to resist the tricks Ruby had taught him. Dean didn’t like the idea of giving Sammy the chance to make that mistake, which was why he knew he had to. He hadn’t exactly been a saint during the Apocalypse-regardless of what the angels said-and Sammy wasn’t tormenting him for the mistakes he had made. He had to show Sam that he trusted him completely, which meant he had to get himself used to trusting Sam again.
“Dean, Dean, Dean. I was so excited when I found out you were the hunters on my trail, why would you disappoint me like this?”
Dean turned to face the voice just in time to see the demon before she had thrown him across the room, head first and not particularly gently. Dean wondered just what he had done to especially piss this demon off. If she was as powerful as he feared, she’d probably been caught in the maelstrom of Demon exorcizing and slaying that had followed Lucifer’s demise. How she got away he couldn’t guess, but if she’d been put through even a bit of the torture he’d had to teach the angels to put the demons through, he was not looking forward to this confrontation.
“Sorry, have we met?”
“Dean, I’m hurt that you wouldn’t recognize me. I thought we were friends.”
The facial expressions she was making were giving him an awful sense of déjà-vu and the way she was talking to him made him think she might have been in the pit while we was there.
“Yeah, I’d Love some small talk, really. We should continue this when you aren’t using your demon mojo to make me feel like I’m on fire.”
“Oh, poor Dean Winchester, having to deal with some discomfort.”
She let the pain ease away, though she still held him flat against the wall. That in itself was just about the weirdest thing Dean had ever experienced in his life-if she had a brain he would have been dead before he hit the wall. He mentally crossed his fingers that she would start monologuing, giving Sammy enough time to swoop in and-
“It’s okay if he does it to save me,” Dean tried to convince himself. After all, Dean had sold his soul to save Sammy-not the most orthodox or, strictly speaking, ethical thing he could have done but he would never regret it, not even if he’d had to stay in the pit for eternity.
“Alright, fine. If you’re not going to guess, I’ll give you a hint,” she released him. “Why don’t you get out your little demon knife, it’ll make you feel like a big, strong man. That way, I can have more fun when I kill you.”
Dean was smiling inwardly. Obviously this demon hadn’t gotten the memo. Dean Winchester was pretty effective at killing demons after years of fighting Lucifer’s hordes. With that blade in his hand, he was damn near unstoppable-demon powers be damned. He slid his hand in his coat pocket-and felt like a train had rolled over him, then turned around and done it again. It was impossible…wasn’t it? It hadn’t been nearly long enough.
“Oops!” the demon said holding up the knife.
“Well, I’ll be damned, Bela. You haven’t changed a bit. Except that you lost the hot accent which was all you really had going for you.”
Bela sighed with a false air of sorrow. “Yes, I’m afraid I only had Americans to pick from. Blonde though, thought you might like that.”
“You came all the way back from hell for that angry sex, huh? What can I say, I’m irresistible.”
“You’re not as cute as you were back then, Dean. Save the smart talk.”
“What’s this all about, Bela? You don’t hate me, you tried to help me, remember that?”
“That was a long time ago, Dean. That was before you went to the pit. And before you got pulled out. You’re quite the legend nowadays. The demons who were around longer, well, they’re all still licking their wounds over you killing Lucifer. Me, I could care less about the boss. But I’ve been barbequing for nearly a thousand years. I really don’t like to think that you missed out on so much fun by leaving the party early. I’m going to send you back. And then, if I ever get stuck down there again, that’s when we’ll be friends again. You can be my date.”
“I’m not going back there. I did my time.”
“Oh, we’ll see about that.”
The wicked smile that had served her so well in life did not work nearly as well on the borrowed face. Terribly pretty though the girl Bela was possessing was, she was nearly disfigured between the black eyes and ghoulish grin.
By now, Dean’s temporary control had been taken away and he was helpless to move or attack again. He decided he’d bided about as much time as he could and that if Bela’s expression got any more warped, he was as good as dead. He opened his mouth to cry out for help, but this time Bela had taken that ability, too.
“Sammy’s not going to hear you, not this time. But it’ll be nice to see what he does when he finds your dead body. Oh! Maybe he’ll get really worked up and use his demon blood for some good again. I hope he does, management says he’s not too far from earning his own little spot in Hell. We can have one wild bash, the three of us.”
Dean tried harder to struggle than before. He knew she was lying, knew she was trying to get him. But the idea of Sammy on the rack terrified him more than fighting Lucifer or facing Hell again.
“Bela, I’m ashamed of you. You’ve gotten too confident. Afraid you were better at being a life-sucking bitch when you were human.”
Bela’s eyes widened, she looked like she was concentrating but nothing was happening. If anything, her hold on Dean was slacking. She didn’t turn to look at Sam. Dean could see fear written on her face.
“Not going to work on me.”
“Oh, yes, how terribly foolish of me. I forgot you’re one of us.”
She turned her attention back to Dean.
“Your baby brother isn’t hurting like you are. I wonder why that is. More demon blood, I should think. Sneaking it while big brother was sleeping? Promise you won’t be too hard on him, Dean. He’s not perfect like you are. Well, go on then. Use your little tricks.”
Dean knew she had resigned herself to death. She was no match for Sam-Dean almost wished it wasn’t true. He could also tell from the way her powers were breaking down that she wouldn’t be able to kill him. But she wasn’t afraid; she meant to do as much damage to Dean’s relationship with his brother as she could. Unfortunately, she had known the brothers too well, had been able to read Dean like a book. If Sam did what she told him to, if he killed her-Dean wanted him to do it, wanted to be saved. But a part of him was sure he would die having to watch Sammy do what he’d hardly survived seeing the first time.
“No, really, Bela. You just don’t have it anymore.”
Suddenly, Sam produced the knife.
“How did you-? You couldn’t-nobody’s ever-“
“Stolen from you? Who would have thought you’d be so easy to trick nowadays. You are one lousy demon; I guess I’m doing you a favor.”
Dean’s affection for his brother seemed to triple in the time it took him to waste Bela. Weird family bonding, but it did the trick.
“Sammy,” Dean cried as soon as he’d recovered his motor control and taken his brother into a bear hug.
“Let’s get out of here, okay?” Sam looked uncomfortable.
“How did you steal it?”
Sam smiled a little uneasily. “It’s like I said, she was a pathetic demon. From the way she must have fit in down there, she probably had a lot of potential. I bet she didn’t wait a day before she was torturing souls. It should have taken way longer to become one, she was only down there for eight years-it usually takes about fifty up here to even make a weak demon. But she was always overconfident-got demonic a little too quickly, probably enjoyed doing some nasty stuff down there, I’m sure the stronger demons had big hopes for her. She got too eager to come up here; she was hardly a demon at all.”
“But she had us running in circles for weeks!”
“Not because she was strong, just because she was clever. She could have done that when she was human, and she would have remembered to check her pockets.”
Dean smiled uneasy. “Well, I’m glad you figured her out. You, uh, sure read a lot from just looking at her…”
“I’m sorry, Dean. I didn’t…do it on purpose. I don’t use it to stop them from hurting me, it just happens. I swear. If I knew how to be completely normal, I would.”
“No, Sam. There’s nothing about you that needs to change. I think I finally get that. I’d be dead right now if you weren’t-“
“A freak?”
“You’ve always been a freak,” he said giving his brother a playful shake. For the first time in too many years, it felt completely right. It felt like before Hell had broken open or, better yet, like the world was finally starting to heal.
[11]
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean, Bela
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Rating: PG-13 for language.
Word Count: 1,949
Author’s Note: What can I say, I really Love hating this character and was, despite my own better judgment, really sad to see her go. This was written for tamingthemuse prompt # 158 - Barbeque which is the worst prompt in the history of mankind. Spoilers up to 4x06. Beta’d by the flawless wutendeskind.
Summary: Post-Apocalypse. Sam and Dean are reunited with Bela…except now she’s an entirely different kind of problem.
Fanfiction Link: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5267608/1/Old_Dogs_New_Tricks
Dean stepped cautiously. He wasn’t used to being this wound up on hunts, but this demon they were after was crafty as all hell, which made him think it was one of the few high-ranking demons that had managed to survive the last brutal battles of the Apocalypse. After twelve days of playing cat and mouse-and sometimes feeling that he was the mouse-Dean was not taking any chances. He heard Sam behind him: breathing a little too loudly, stepping a little too easy. Sam was always less tense when they were hunting demons. It was just one of the things from before Lucifer’s rise and fall that Dean did not like to think about. If he had his way, Sam would stay behind at the motel on these hunts, safe from the demons or rather, safe from the uneasy fact that they couldn’t hurt him.
“I think we should split up.”
“What? With a nasty case like this? That’s insane.”
“She’ll take us both at once without a problem, especially if she’s as strong as you think she is. If we split up, there’s a chance we can surprise her.”
“How do you know it’s a she?” Dean asked.
Sam made an “I’m sorry” face that gave Dean the obvious answer. He never would have asked that question if he’d taken more than two seconds to think about it. He tried to shake the image of Sam with blacked out eyes clear from his mind.
“Right, yeah, never mind.”
In the end Sam had won out. Like it or not, he was chillingly effective at hunting demons.
“Just promise, if you find her first you’ll wait for-“
“I’ll wait for you and the knife, Dean. You need to trust me.”
Dean nodded. He did trust his brother, with everything else. Too many mistakes had come from good intentions, however, and Dean wasn’t so sure that if faced with letting the demon escape and using the powers he’d promised to never use again, Sam would be able to resist the tricks Ruby had taught him. Dean didn’t like the idea of giving Sammy the chance to make that mistake, which was why he knew he had to. He hadn’t exactly been a saint during the Apocalypse-regardless of what the angels said-and Sammy wasn’t tormenting him for the mistakes he had made. He had to show Sam that he trusted him completely, which meant he had to get himself used to trusting Sam again.
“Dean, Dean, Dean. I was so excited when I found out you were the hunters on my trail, why would you disappoint me like this?”
Dean turned to face the voice just in time to see the demon before she had thrown him across the room, head first and not particularly gently. Dean wondered just what he had done to especially piss this demon off. If she was as powerful as he feared, she’d probably been caught in the maelstrom of Demon exorcizing and slaying that had followed Lucifer’s demise. How she got away he couldn’t guess, but if she’d been put through even a bit of the torture he’d had to teach the angels to put the demons through, he was not looking forward to this confrontation.
“Sorry, have we met?”
“Dean, I’m hurt that you wouldn’t recognize me. I thought we were friends.”
The facial expressions she was making were giving him an awful sense of déjà-vu and the way she was talking to him made him think she might have been in the pit while we was there.
“Yeah, I’d Love some small talk, really. We should continue this when you aren’t using your demon mojo to make me feel like I’m on fire.”
“Oh, poor Dean Winchester, having to deal with some discomfort.”
She let the pain ease away, though she still held him flat against the wall. That in itself was just about the weirdest thing Dean had ever experienced in his life-if she had a brain he would have been dead before he hit the wall. He mentally crossed his fingers that she would start monologuing, giving Sammy enough time to swoop in and-
“It’s okay if he does it to save me,” Dean tried to convince himself. After all, Dean had sold his soul to save Sammy-not the most orthodox or, strictly speaking, ethical thing he could have done but he would never regret it, not even if he’d had to stay in the pit for eternity.
“Alright, fine. If you’re not going to guess, I’ll give you a hint,” she released him. “Why don’t you get out your little demon knife, it’ll make you feel like a big, strong man. That way, I can have more fun when I kill you.”
Dean was smiling inwardly. Obviously this demon hadn’t gotten the memo. Dean Winchester was pretty effective at killing demons after years of fighting Lucifer’s hordes. With that blade in his hand, he was damn near unstoppable-demon powers be damned. He slid his hand in his coat pocket-and felt like a train had rolled over him, then turned around and done it again. It was impossible…wasn’t it? It hadn’t been nearly long enough.
“Oops!” the demon said holding up the knife.
“Well, I’ll be damned, Bela. You haven’t changed a bit. Except that you lost the hot accent which was all you really had going for you.”
Bela sighed with a false air of sorrow. “Yes, I’m afraid I only had Americans to pick from. Blonde though, thought you might like that.”
“You came all the way back from hell for that angry sex, huh? What can I say, I’m irresistible.”
“You’re not as cute as you were back then, Dean. Save the smart talk.”
“What’s this all about, Bela? You don’t hate me, you tried to help me, remember that?”
“That was a long time ago, Dean. That was before you went to the pit. And before you got pulled out. You’re quite the legend nowadays. The demons who were around longer, well, they’re all still licking their wounds over you killing Lucifer. Me, I could care less about the boss. But I’ve been barbequing for nearly a thousand years. I really don’t like to think that you missed out on so much fun by leaving the party early. I’m going to send you back. And then, if I ever get stuck down there again, that’s when we’ll be friends again. You can be my date.”
“I’m not going back there. I did my time.”
“Oh, we’ll see about that.”
The wicked smile that had served her so well in life did not work nearly as well on the borrowed face. Terribly pretty though the girl Bela was possessing was, she was nearly disfigured between the black eyes and ghoulish grin.
By now, Dean’s temporary control had been taken away and he was helpless to move or attack again. He decided he’d bided about as much time as he could and that if Bela’s expression got any more warped, he was as good as dead. He opened his mouth to cry out for help, but this time Bela had taken that ability, too.
“Sammy’s not going to hear you, not this time. But it’ll be nice to see what he does when he finds your dead body. Oh! Maybe he’ll get really worked up and use his demon blood for some good again. I hope he does, management says he’s not too far from earning his own little spot in Hell. We can have one wild bash, the three of us.”
Dean tried harder to struggle than before. He knew she was lying, knew she was trying to get him. But the idea of Sammy on the rack terrified him more than fighting Lucifer or facing Hell again.
“Bela, I’m ashamed of you. You’ve gotten too confident. Afraid you were better at being a life-sucking bitch when you were human.”
Bela’s eyes widened, she looked like she was concentrating but nothing was happening. If anything, her hold on Dean was slacking. She didn’t turn to look at Sam. Dean could see fear written on her face.
“Not going to work on me.”
“Oh, yes, how terribly foolish of me. I forgot you’re one of us.”
She turned her attention back to Dean.
“Your baby brother isn’t hurting like you are. I wonder why that is. More demon blood, I should think. Sneaking it while big brother was sleeping? Promise you won’t be too hard on him, Dean. He’s not perfect like you are. Well, go on then. Use your little tricks.”
Dean knew she had resigned herself to death. She was no match for Sam-Dean almost wished it wasn’t true. He could also tell from the way her powers were breaking down that she wouldn’t be able to kill him. But she wasn’t afraid; she meant to do as much damage to Dean’s relationship with his brother as she could. Unfortunately, she had known the brothers too well, had been able to read Dean like a book. If Sam did what she told him to, if he killed her-Dean wanted him to do it, wanted to be saved. But a part of him was sure he would die having to watch Sammy do what he’d hardly survived seeing the first time.
“No, really, Bela. You just don’t have it anymore.”
Suddenly, Sam produced the knife.
“How did you-? You couldn’t-nobody’s ever-“
“Stolen from you? Who would have thought you’d be so easy to trick nowadays. You are one lousy demon; I guess I’m doing you a favor.”
Dean’s affection for his brother seemed to triple in the time it took him to waste Bela. Weird family bonding, but it did the trick.
“Sammy,” Dean cried as soon as he’d recovered his motor control and taken his brother into a bear hug.
“Let’s get out of here, okay?” Sam looked uncomfortable.
“How did you steal it?”
Sam smiled a little uneasily. “It’s like I said, she was a pathetic demon. From the way she must have fit in down there, she probably had a lot of potential. I bet she didn’t wait a day before she was torturing souls. It should have taken way longer to become one, she was only down there for eight years-it usually takes about fifty up here to even make a weak demon. But she was always overconfident-got demonic a little too quickly, probably enjoyed doing some nasty stuff down there, I’m sure the stronger demons had big hopes for her. She got too eager to come up here; she was hardly a demon at all.”
“But she had us running in circles for weeks!”
“Not because she was strong, just because she was clever. She could have done that when she was human, and she would have remembered to check her pockets.”
Dean smiled uneasy. “Well, I’m glad you figured her out. You, uh, sure read a lot from just looking at her…”
“I’m sorry, Dean. I didn’t…do it on purpose. I don’t use it to stop them from hurting me, it just happens. I swear. If I knew how to be completely normal, I would.”
“No, Sam. There’s nothing about you that needs to change. I think I finally get that. I’d be dead right now if you weren’t-“
“A freak?”
“You’ve always been a freak,” he said giving his brother a playful shake. For the first time in too many years, it felt completely right. It felt like before Hell had broken open or, better yet, like the world was finally starting to heal.
[11]