Fic: Bad Company (1/7)
Fic: Bad Company (1/7)
Series: Special Projects
Summary: Dean and Chloe get in serious trouble. Will Sam realize it in time to save them?
Author: pen37
Beta: Strangevisitor7
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean, Sarah
Pairing:Chloe/Dean Sam/Sarah
Rating: pg-13
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Dean woke with a pounding head and an aching everything else. He was disoriented, confused, and pretty sure that he wasn't back in the motel bed. He hadn't been in this condition in a while. At least not since meeting Chloe.
Since their first meeting, the little blonde had been a steady presence in his life - one that kept all other women off his radar, and made him think twice before taking that last shot of whiskey that would start the slow slide into oblivion.
As his brain fought the rocky uphill path toward consciousness, he took stock of the situation. His first realization sent him barreling into consciousness with a start: he was chained up: suspended by the wrists, barely supporting his weight on the balls of his feet. Unable to get at the lock picks that he kept hidden in his pockets or any weapons his captors might have missed.
He cracked his eyes open, then bit back a curse. Anyone else wouldn't have been able to see, but his eyesight was sharper than most, thanks to his recent mutation. However, the sight wasn't encouraging. He was being held in an old meat locker, suspended from the rafters by a hook.
The pressure he felt along the full length of his back told him that someone was chained behind him. He turned his head as far as it would go. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Chloe's blonde hair.
With another curse, he tried to fight through the mental fog to recall the events that led to this particular situation. It wasn't easy: it felt like his head was stuffed with cotton.
They'd been in the midst of hunting down the members of a particularly nasty cult. One that was resurrecting old Mesoamerican blood sacrificial rituals. The grim work had been starting to get to them, and he'd felt like they needed a break. So he'd taken her off to relax while a cop friend of Chloe's, Daniel Mackenzie, chased down a lead.
They'd just come back to the hotel when - Dean couldn't quite remember what happened. That, more than anything bothered him.
“Chloe.” His tongue felt thick and clumsy. “Chloe, wake up.”
“Mmm?” She moaned. Obviously fighting unconsciousness as much as he had.
“Chloe, honey. I need you to wake up.”
“Dean?” Her own voice was slurred. “What happened?”
“I was hoping you could tell me, Darlin’.” He drawled. “I'm all about being chained up. But usually I like a bed to be involved.”
“Funny,” she trailed off absently. “What do you remember?”
“Getting out of the Impala at the hotel,” Dean said.
“Me too,” Chloe nodded. “Someone must have jumped us.”
“Think it might have been the cult?”
“Unless you've pissed off Gordon Walker again.”
“That was only the one time,” Dean protested mildly.
Chloe snorted in response.
Dean looked down at his hip pocket where his lock picks rested with a feeling of longing. So close. He tried to look over his shoulder to Chloe. “I don't suppose you're still wearing hairpins, are you?”
“Not anymore,” Chloe said wryly.
“Damn,” Dean muttered. “Knew it was too much to wish for.”
“So how are we going to get out of this one?”
“Can you yell for Clark?”
“I would if it would do any good,” Chloe sighed. “It's his month in rotation for staffing the moon base. In space - Superman can't hear me scream.”
“You keep up with this stuff?” Dean asked incredulously.
“If I'm going to get in trouble, I like to know if the army of one can come to my rescue or not,” Chloe said.
“Well, maybe when we don't check in with Sam, he'll figure out something's wrong,” he sighed.
Chloe was suddenly quiet in the way that Dean knew meant that she was thinking things through, and the conclusion she was coming up with would put him in the dog house.
“How would Sam get here in time if he's in Metropolis helping Sarah set up an auction house?”
Oops.
Dean leaned his head back. With his height advantage, it was like pillowing on top of Chloe's own head. “He's . . . not exactly in Metropolis.”
“Where is he?” Chloe sounded confused and a little suspicious.
“Maybe . . . a little closer,” Dean hedged.
“How close is a little closer?”
“Couple hours away, tops.”
She lapsed into an uncomfortable silence that left Dean wondering what she was thinking.
“You sent him to check out Mac, didn't you?”
“No,” Dean said.
“So Sam' s being in Texas has nothing to do with Daniel Mackenzie?” Chloe asked shrewdly.
Dean sighed. Why had he ever married a reporter? “I might have asked him to find out a little bit about Mac's family.”
“Dean,” she broke off, and then let loose a string of garbled foreign words.
“Hey! If you're going to call me names, at least do it in English. I can't even defend myself if you're insulting me in freaky Irish and alien.”
“Gaelic and Kryptonian.”
“Whatever.”
She lapsed into a cold silence. Dean let out a heavy sigh. “Awesome.”
“We'll talk about this later,” Chloe said. She wriggled around behind him, giving Dean the impression that she was testing her own bonds. “If we rocked hard enough, do you think we could slide off that hook?”
Dean studied it in the low light. His preternatural senses picking out details that Chloe's own eyes would miss. “No good,” he said shortly. “It's almost a closed loop.”
“Great,” she sighed. “I know you can jump that high.”
“I could if I wasn't standing on tiptoe,” Dean said. “No leverage.”
“You too?”
“I wouldn't have any more luck boosting you, either,” Dean sighed. “These guys knew what they were doing.”
“I wonder where they got the information,” Chloe muttered.
As if in answer to her question, the door opened. Dean squinted against the light as he craned his neck to see.
From her angle, Chloe had an easier view. He felt her sigh in relief against his back.
“Mac! Thank God!”
Dean frowned. At first glance, it would seem that they were rescued. But somehow, Dean felt like Mac's appearance was too coincidental. His suspicions were confirmed when a black-eyed dude who was dressed in ceremonial robes that reminded Dean of a Vegas showgirl followed the detective into the room.
Chloe grew silent as she made the mental connection. “Mac?” Her voice sounded hopeful. As if she still believed that he might grin at her, and tell her that it was all a sick joke. “What's going on?”
“Sorry, Sully.” His voice, at least, sounded uncomfortable, as if he were genuinely apologizing. “I'm not the cavalry this time.”
Dean clenched his jaw. “You sonofa --.”
“I had this case solved a couple weeks back,” Mac continued as if he hadn't heard Dean. “But before I could close in, they got to me first.”
The demon in the feathers circled around them until it was facing Dean. It smiled at him toothily and jammed a knife in his shoulder.
He gritted his teeth against the pain and blistered the air with curses, but the demon ignored him as it swabbed at his shoulder, and then dropped the swab into a glass tube. Behind him, he heard Chloe hiss - probably more out of shock than pain. But the sound made him see red.
“Chloe?” He turned his neck as best he could, but all he could see was Mac backing away with his own swab of her blood.
He glared over her shoulder at her old friend.
Mac seemed to sense the heat of his glare, met his eyes briefly. and just as quickly he dropped his gaze.
“If you touch her again, I'll fucking kill you,” he spat out.
“I'm alright,” Chloe said softly to him. She leaned her head against the back of his shoulder in a brief gesture of comfort, before raising her head again in a way that Dean knew meant that she was glaring at Mac.
“What the hell, Mac? You're a hunter.”
“Not any more,” Mac's voice was quiet. As if he were ashamed of his actions.
“Your family--”
“Aren't available,” Mac cut her off. “No one can help me.”
“So you're just going to hand us off to a blood cult?” Chloe's voice dropped low with the weight of disappointment, anger and betrayal. “After what cultists like them did to your unit? They were your friends and they were slaughtered like animals.”
“I know,” Mac shifted under the force of her righteous anger. “I'm not saying this is right. I haven't got a lot of choice here.”
“They gave you a Congressional Medal of Honor over what went down in Corto Maltese,” Chloe spat out. He looked up, and swallowed convulsively. Then he turned, and fled the room.
“This is not the way to repay that!” Chloe shouted after him. “This is not the way to honor their memories!”
The demon smirked at them one last time, then walked deliberately after Mac.
Chloe bit out a shaky sob.
“Hey,” Dean whispered to her.
“Don't,” Chloe said. “I don't want to hear I told you so.”
“Okay,” he said as he leaned his head against hers. “If it makes you feel better, I don't think your friend is happy about this.”
“It doesn't,” Chloe sniffed.
“Chloe?”
“Yeah?”
“From now on can we vote on which random guy friends you hang out with?”
In spite of herself, Chloe let out a shaky laugh. “In my defense, Clark and Ollie are just fine.”
“Well, they have the whole not turning us over to a freaky cult thing in their favor. But Darlin', one's freakin' ET, and the other has a Robin Hood complex.”
“And Gordon Walker was a picture of mental stability.”
“Ouch,” Dean muttered.
“Dean?”
“Yeah?
“We're going to get out of this, right?”
“We've been in worse situations.”
“We've got to stop getting into scrapes that make us say that.” Chloe muttered.