Fic: Ex Machina (1/9)
Fic: Ex Machina (1/9)
Series: Special Projects
Summary: After their experience with the Demon Meg, Chloe is broken. Dean is shattered. Somehow, they've got to find a way back, while at the same time figuring out how to stop a Demon-made Artificial Intelegence.
Author: pen37
Beta: Clarksmuse
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural/DCU
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean
Pairing:Chloe/Dean
Rating: Pg-13.
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #67 Snow. The table is here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9
Sunlight peeked through the old barn loft as if afraid to wake its sleeping occupants. It crept - catlike -- down the far wall and across the floor to fall upon the couple that lay entwined within a sleeping bag on a nest of hay.
Dean Winchester blinked sleepily and then squinted as the sunlight kissed his eyelids. His limbs felt weighted with lassitude, which gave him no desire to move. Despite the languid feeling, he glanced down at the small blonde whose head was pillowed on his chest.
Chloe Sullivan slept with a careworn expression. A slight frown marred her features and her brows knit together as if her own demons wouldn't leave her alone, even in her dreams. Dean shut his eyes and tried desperately not to think about the situation that put that expression on her face. But his mental struggle was quickly lost as visions of the past three days danced through his head.
He lifted a hand to stroke her hair and noted with detached fascination that it still shook after all this time. The trembling seemed to get worse as he was assaulted by memories of being possessed by a demon, of the way it had used his knowledge of Chloe - and her own fears - against them. He remembered how helpless he'd felt when the demon used his own hands to entomb her within the wall of an old hotel and left her there to die. Then, while it tormented him with thoughts of what she was going through, it attempted to kill Bobby and Sam.
While intellectually he knew he had no control over what happened, it did nothing to stop the gut-level feelings of recrimination and guilt that plagued him.
If he had his choice, he'd never let himself near Chloe again. Not when he couldn't be trusted to protect her.
But it seemed that he really didn't get a choice in the matter. Chloe came out of the wall more broken than ever - if her adventures in meditating in the rain and her midnight barefoot wanderings around the salvage yard were any indication. She seemed almost disinterested in caring for herself.
He wasn't certain how much of that neglect was due to her mental state, and how much of it was because her immune system was currently amped up to 11. He wondered if she even felt the cold right now.
Even more maddeningly, she wouldn't listen to anyone but him. And although she was temporarily mute - at least until her vocal cords reattached themselves - she'd still made it clear through her actions that she needed him.
He smoothed down her hair, and made soothing noises in the back of his throat.
“Its okay, Chloe,” he whispered to her. “I'm still here.”
In response to his voice, her brow smoothed and her frown eased. He wished he could wipe out all their problems that easily.
Dean shifted beneath her in discomfort. It wasn't his preferred way to sleep. In the past, they'd slept folded together like spoons in a kitchen drawer, with her almost half-under him so that he could shelter and protect her with his body. But given her most recent attack of claustrophobia - sleeping like that wasn't possible.
Speaking of which - he reached across her, and unzipped her side of the sleeping bag so that she wouldn't wake up feeling trapped. The last thing he wanted was for her to wake disoriented and unable to move. If she did that, she was likely to come up swinging.
His movement must have shaken her out of sleep, because she lifted her head and blinked tiredly at him. At some point in the night, she’d shifted so that his amulet had pressed into her cheek. As she lifted her head, he could see the impression still there.
“Good morning sunshine,” he whispered to her.
“M - Morning,” she whispered experimentally.
“Looks like your vocal chords are fixed.”
“Mostly,” she rasped. “Feels too tight, though.”
“They’re probably not one hundred percent yet.”
She nodded and then rested her chin on the meaty part of his shoulder. “Don’t want to sleep longer.”
“Bad dreams?”
“Strange dreams,” Chloe made a face. “Meteors and the box and the car and the walls falling in and the lab all mixed up.”
“That’s a lot to deal with at once.”
“I guess.” She looked up at him through lowered lashes. “Did you sleep?”
“A little,” Dean nodded.
“Liar.”
“A little.”
“Dean - it’s okay, you know.”
“I’m fine.”
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Bull. Shit.” She mocked his own deep southern accent as she enunciated her words.
“Big talk for such a little lady.”
“You want big talk? Bovine excrement. I’m lying here without a stitch of clothing, and your eyes haven’t traveled further south than my chin. So bullshit.”
Dean automatically reached for the edge of the sleeping bag. But Chloe threw her arm around him and shifted her weight.
“Stay. Please. I don’t want to get up yet.”
Dean frowned at her. He could easily shake her off. But given the way she reacted last night when he almost couldn’t carry her to the barn, he suspected that she’d take it as physical rejection. Which would do more harm than good.
“Why not?”
She sighed. “If I get up, I’ve got to figure out how to fix myself.”
Dean blinked at that. That - wasn’t what he expected to hear. “Just like that? You decided you’re just going to . . . fix yourself?”
“Well . . . no, not just like that. That’s actually what I was thinking about when you found me out in the rain last night.” She sighed. “Look, I’m not an idiot. I know that I’m kind of . . . not right.”
Chloe’s words absolutely shattered him. He pulled her closer, tucked her under his chin and squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to her. He hated how defeated and broken he sounded.
“Stop. Dean, just stop.” She wriggled free of his grasp, and he felt her weight settle more squarely over him. He supposed it was so that she could look him level in the eyes.
“Chloe, you don’t understand,” he opened his eyes and looked up to regard her misty expression.
She responded with an indelicate snort. “You think you’re the only one in this family to pull a Linda Blair? Last time I checked, you were last in line behind me and Sam. And of the three of us, I’ve got the two of you edged out on frequency and variety.”
“But you weren’t aware.” Dean countered.
“Which was a blessing with the slutty French witch, I’ll give you,” Chloe said. “But not so much with Gretchen Winters, considering that everyone thought I was going crazy. But my point is that you couldn’t stop that thing from using you any more than I could have stopped Gretchen from using me.”
She pinned him with an even look before continuing.
“And you’re no more responsible for what that thing did with your body than I was suicidal because of the way my wrists got cut when Gretchen possessed me.”
“I just don’t feel that way,” Dean said with a violent shake of his head. “It said that it was going to come after you. I should have seen it coming.”
“Well, for that matter, I should have, too.”
He blinked at that. “What?”
Chloe plucked at his amulet by way of reply. “I’ve never seen you take this thing off. You even sleep with it. But you didn’t have it on when you came out of that store. That should have been a tip-off that something was wrong.”
Dean shrugged. “It’s easy to dismiss. I could have had it inside my shirt.”
“I thought there was something odd about you. But not enough to raise a red flag.” She shook her head. “I was sloppy. So if you’re handing out blame - don’t hog it all. I think there’s enough to go around.”
He laid his head back against the nest of hay and sighed up at the ceiling. The problem with Chloe was that she was so damn logical. He couldn’t make an argument without her circling around it.
“Do you have to be so damn right all the time?” He growled in frustration.
“On this I do,” She said quietly as she rested her cheek on his chest again. “You’ve got to let go of this stupid guilt. And until you do, I’m going to keep telling you this stuff. Whether you want to hear it or not.”
Dean shook his head. Why did the people he love always force his back to the wall? The last thing he wanted to do was talk. But there wasn't much he could do about that with 110 pounds of persistent reporter laying on top of him like he was an old sofa.
“Whenever I think of you in that wall. I feel helpless. It’s my job to protect you,” he confessed. There, he said it. Let the chips fall where they damn well pleased.
“No.” Chloe shook her head. Dean looked down at her with a disbelieving stare.
“It’s your job to try.”
“Well, thanks for that. You’re like some kind of full-on anti-Yoda.”
She snorted at that. “Dean, I’ve been in and out of scrapes as far back as I can remember. And - despite the fact that I grew up with the original big damn hero - I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been near-death. It’s past the flirting stage. Death and me? We’ve exchanged phone numbers.”
Dean winced at again having Clark brought up. It seemed like he’d never quite escape mention of Superman. He shook his head, but Chloe stopped him with a finger on his lips.
“Let me finish. In the time that I’ve been with you and Sam, I’ve been a hundred times more protected than I ever was in Smallville. But crap still happens. Even with Clark around, I still got thrown off a bridge and bitten by a vampire sorority chick and nearly cut in two by a handless, telekinetic, chainsaw wielding boyfriend.”
Dean snorted at that.
“And that was just a few of the high points,” Chloe said mildly. “My point is that crap happened. Crap will probably happen in the future. The difference here - was that I didn’t lose faith in you.”
“I almost didn’t get there in time,” Dean said.
“That doesn't matter, because you never left me,” Chloe smiled, and tapped the side of her head. “Even if the worst happened, I had hope. You gave me that. And my sanity. The only reason I’m not in Belle Reeve or Arkham or wherever the hell Ollie has my mother stashed, is that I had you in here fighting for me.”
Dean shut his eyes, and dropped a kiss to her forehead. “What did I do to deserve you?”
“You save people and take zero credit,” Chloe said. “I’ve got a thing for you hero types.”
“You better only have a thing for one of us hero types in particular.”
“I guess I’m just a Dean Winchester groupie,” she chuckled.
“Let’s just form a mutual appreciation society,” Dean said. “So now that you’ve forced me to have a chick flick moment, will you get off of me so I can get up?”
“I guess. But you better realize that every time you get all mopey, I’m going to administer my boot to your head.”
“I don’t get mopey,” Dean said.
“Sorry, you don’t mope. Yours is a manly brood.”
“I can’t win with you, can I?”
She tilted her head down, and stared at him with eyes that were more vividly green than he remembered. “You already did, Dean. A long time ago.”
Dean blinked at that. “Oh.”
