A mari usque ad mare - Part 7 (8/14)
A mari usque ad mare - Part 7 (8/14)
2,132/28,777 of R rated Gen (with an edge of subtext) crack!fic in which Dean revisits his past in unexpected ways. (‘The name’s Greer. Dean Greer.’)
Prologue | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Epilogue
Part 7
Reflection
‘Bras, dude. They’re a bitch!’ Dean said with feeling as he shoved Sam out of the bedroom with an armful of clean clothes.
‘But …’
‘Nope. Not getting dressed with you in here. That’s way too weird, even for me, Sammy.’
‘Stranger than the time-travel and body swapping?’ Sam asked through the door.
‘Yes!’ Dean shouted back, busy finding out that bras were indeed worse than wimples. Damn, and once upon a time from now he’d been an expert at stripping them off women. It was a lot harder getting into them, especially when you were trying not to look at what you were doing. Dean presumed that all women must be born double-jointed. In the end he cheated, and put one on backwards before twisting it around and hiking everything up with his eyes closed. He guessed that, like fraud, it was the sort of thing that you got better at with practice. Dean just didn’t want to be a woman long enough to get used to underwire bras; it was a hell of a lot of effort for cleavage. The very next girl that demonstrated her best features for him in a bar was going to be bought a drink out of pure sympathy, no matter what Sam said about it. No wonder women used to burn their bras back in the … Hah! Goodbye corset of doom.
Yup, easier coming off. Dean only just stopped himself from dumping an entire drawer of lingerie into the trash and setting it all alight. He spent much too long pouring through the closet rejecting one outfit after another before he eventually got dressed in a pair of flared jeans which he accessorised with a nice, tight pink t-shirt. There was no way he was going to wear another dress ever again after the debacle of the nun’s habit.
Mirrors were tricky suckers, Dean decided. He’d been avoiding them since he first saw his mother’s face looking back at him in the bathroom. He hadn’t wanted to be reminded that he was a woman. Every time he tried to wrap his mind around the idea it shied off somewhere else as fast as it could. That was pretty much how he’d ended up on the roof. He’d just needed to get out of his mother’s head for a while.
Trying to block it out hadn’t helped. Much as he’d rather not admit it, he was curious. Standing looking at himself in the full-length mirror only made him more so. He certainly didn’t look pregnant. Dean turned sideways. Nope, no baby bump yet. Mom was gorgeous; he looked hot, he thought with satisfaction. There was no getting around it; there were great genes on both sides of the family. It explained him. Sammy? Well, that was another matter.
He smoothed his hands over his stomach. Exploring. ‘Hey, little Dean,’ he whispered. ‘How are you doing in there? I know this must kind of bizarre for you, especially as Mom’s not here at the moment. I guess you know that I’m you, right? Uh … anyway I just wanted to tell you not to worry, I may not be her, but I know all about kids. Hell, I pretty much raised Sammy. Oh, you haven’t met him yet. He’s going to be your bratty kid brother. Don’t take any shit from him, okay? He’s a major geek, but trust me, you’ll kind of get used to having him around. Plus he’s really good at Latin, and all the research. You’re going to need that later on. But you don’t want to hear about that now. Sammy’s here too, inside Dad, which is kind of confusing, but don’t worry, between us we’ll be able to fix it. So you just settle down, and kick back and chill, okay?’ Dean stroked his stomach gently as he settled into the comfy armchair next to the window.
‘I bet Mom has been singing to you since she found out you were riding shotgun. I might have been young but I remember that. Even Dad used to sing in the car before …’ Disturbed at that train of thought he shifted in the chair, one hand still stroking; calming. ‘What was it she used to sing to us all the time? Oh yeah,
Where are you going my little one ... little one
Where are you going my baby ... my own
Turn around and you're young
Turn around and you're grown …’
♒
‘If you start calling it “wee Dean” I’m going to throw up,’ Sam said with a pouty look after he opened the door onto what he later described as Dean gushing his inner chick all over the baby and half the floor.
Dean patted him consolingly on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay Sammy, you’ll always be second in my heart after Mini Me.’ He was just thankful he’d stopped singing lullabies and had moved on to Meat Loaf before Sam had interrupted his musical montage. Sensibly Dean Junior seemed to agree with the idea that objects in the rear view mirror really might appear closer than they were.
Sam wrinkled his nose in response before snickering, ‘Nice flowers, Dean. Very uh … feminine.’
Dean decided it was safer to ignore his brother, and the embroidery flourishing along the side seams of his jeans. He stepped over the piles of discarded clothes and went back to rummaging in the closet, this time in quest of some more comfortable shoes. He groped amongst the boxes his mother had piled in a corner. Strappy, dainty sandals. Shoes with heels so high he’d need to clip an altimeter to his collar before he took off out the door in them. His Mom had a lot of great … um … shoes, but was it too much to ask that he never have to wear heels again? Hang on. That last big box felt oddly weighty. He pulled it towards him and slid the lid off to find a leather satchel tucked neatly inside.
‘What?’ Sam asked from over his shoulder.
‘Well, I don’t think it’s Mom’s secret handbag collection,’ Dean said as he dragged the box back out into the centre of the room.
He didn’t look up as Sam settled cross-legged on the floor next to him. He had an odd feeling about this, and could tell from his brother’s tenseness that he could sense something wrong too. Dean finally reached out and carefully lifted the heavy satchel out and placed it between them. After a minute he flipped the flap back and eased the contents onto the carpet. Fuck.
‘Is that?’
‘Uh huh,’ Dean answered, stating the obvious. Looked like their Mom was much more than a pretty face. A lot more so than either of them had ever imagined.
It was Sam who unrolled the bundle that comprised a gun securely fastened inside its shoulder harness, a cleaning kit, and enough spare ammunition to take out a small town. A harness that was definitely too small for their father’s frame.
‘This one’s just right,’ Dean said shakily as he slid his arms through the straps and felt the custom-shaped leather mould comfortably around his shoulders. When checked, the gun was fully loaded and though it was immaculately maintained, it had obviously seen a lot of use. What the hell?
‘Mom?’ Sam asked, confused.
‘Dunno, Sammy,’ Dean answered, attention now fixed on the last item he’d pulled from the bag. A large, flat, and intricately carved wooden chest.
‘Dean?’
‘It’ll be okay, Sammy,’ Dean said reassuringly as he unfastened the lid, opened it, and … stopped. A sea of white crystals. He dipped a finger in to touch, before bringing it up to taste what he knew all too well. Salt, a whole box filled to the brim with ... more than salt. He sifted the hidden contents free, bringing a small drawstring pouch, and a curved leather sheath to the surface as he heard Sam take a sudden awed breath.
The same knife their father had given Sammy on his thirteenth birthday, simply saying, “Learn it. Keep it.” And Sammy had; cherishing it like no other weapon he ever handled. He’d only used it twice that Dean knew of, both times with a fervent, almost brutal effectiveness, and pure intensity that it almost frightened Dean. On a positive side neither of Dean’s attackers had lasted more than a minute after Sam unsheathed it. It had, and always would be, Sam’s last resort; the weapon he brought out when he had no other choice, or the stakes were simply too high.
The look on Sam’s face now as he held his knife up, delighting in the light angling off its cool surface, said it all. Dean knew what Sam wanted so badly to do. ‘Later, Sam. Now’s not the time.’ Sam just nodded as he fastened the knife to his belt. He wasn’t going to be going anywhere without it.
Dean didn’t need to open the next item. None of it made any sense, but he knew, somehow they both knew what was in it; his amulet. The same amulet Sammy had given him that Christmas. The one Bobby had meant for their father. Or had he?
‘You might as well put it on,’ Sam said softly, prising Dean’s right hand open, and easing the pouch free. ‘I think it’s missed you.’
That comment shouldn’t have made such an impact on Dean. He knew exactly how the amulet felt even if it was logically only meeting him - both of him - for the first time.
Somehow, here they were, all these years earlier, their two relics, united together under the twin shields of salt and their mother’s protection.
Dean knew it was superstitious, but he needed this moment to echo the first, no matter how silly that might sound. He looked mutely at his brother. You do it.
In harmony with Dean’s thoughts Sam leant forward to brush the amulet in fleeting benediction across their mother’s stomach before lowering it over his head with a whispered ‘… take this.’
As the comforting weight settled on his chest once more, Dean relaxed properly for the first time since Sisomso. Safe.
‘Mom was a ... hunter?’ Sam asked as he made an unnecessary adjustment to the amulet before lowering his hands again.
‘Looks like,’ Dean answered more calmly than he felt. Everything they thought they knew about their family had just been swept away.
‘Did Dad … know?’
There was the never-ending question of the century. Did you Dad? Were you both hunters from the start? Why couldn’t you tell us that? Or was this Mom’s secret? Her other life, hidden away. When did you find out, Dad? Before, or after? Or much later? It explained so much, and all too little.
As Dean’s eyes filled with sudden easy tears - damn the hormones for making him so emotional - he had no answers.
♒
Dean’s answer to absolutely everything his entire life had always been action. If he’d ever taken the time to think about it he might have blamed it first on whatever had killed their mother and swept them into this incessant cycle of vengeance, then on his father’s “take no prisoners” attitude to hunting, and finally on his own frantic need to keep moving, in the futile hope that one of these days he’d get there first, before anybody could get hurt. Or it might just be the fact that watching Sam sit still with a book, seemingly oblivious to his presence, for more than two minutes drove him so fucking crazy he just had to do something. In the end, as always, it came back to Sam.
Watching his brother struggling to comprehend the mystery that was their mother, Dean’s automatic response was to ignore his own pain and try to fix things. This? It wasn’t something he could put right any time soon. So Dean chose the next best option. ‘Let’s go kill Harvey for good this time.’
Sam blinked back to attention. ‘Do you mind if I hold him down long enough to find us a way out of this?’
Nerds. Always with the picky details. ‘You can practice your interrogation techniques on the way, Sam. I vote you go for speed over style this time.’
Sam just sniffed disdainfully. It wasn’t an expression Dean could ever recall seeing on his father’s face. In that single moment he would have given anything to see the real John Winchester looking back at him for a measly thirteen seconds, or even five.
Dean shrugged that wish aside. ‘Let’s hit the road and do it. Sam and Dean, Bonnie and Clyde …’
‘John and Mary?’
Dean’s voice softened. ‘Yeah. Mom and Dad. Let’s do it.’
♒
Part 8
2,132/28,777 of R rated Gen (with an edge of subtext) crack!fic in which Dean revisits his past in unexpected ways. (‘The name’s Greer. Dean Greer.’)
Prologue | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Epilogue
Part 7
Reflection
‘Bras, dude. They’re a bitch!’ Dean said with feeling as he shoved Sam out of the bedroom with an armful of clean clothes.
‘But …’
‘Nope. Not getting dressed with you in here. That’s way too weird, even for me, Sammy.’
‘Stranger than the time-travel and body swapping?’ Sam asked through the door.
‘Yes!’ Dean shouted back, busy finding out that bras were indeed worse than wimples. Damn, and once upon a time from now he’d been an expert at stripping them off women. It was a lot harder getting into them, especially when you were trying not to look at what you were doing. Dean presumed that all women must be born double-jointed. In the end he cheated, and put one on backwards before twisting it around and hiking everything up with his eyes closed. He guessed that, like fraud, it was the sort of thing that you got better at with practice. Dean just didn’t want to be a woman long enough to get used to underwire bras; it was a hell of a lot of effort for cleavage. The very next girl that demonstrated her best features for him in a bar was going to be bought a drink out of pure sympathy, no matter what Sam said about it. No wonder women used to burn their bras back in the … Hah! Goodbye corset of doom.
Yup, easier coming off. Dean only just stopped himself from dumping an entire drawer of lingerie into the trash and setting it all alight. He spent much too long pouring through the closet rejecting one outfit after another before he eventually got dressed in a pair of flared jeans which he accessorised with a nice, tight pink t-shirt. There was no way he was going to wear another dress ever again after the debacle of the nun’s habit.
Mirrors were tricky suckers, Dean decided. He’d been avoiding them since he first saw his mother’s face looking back at him in the bathroom. He hadn’t wanted to be reminded that he was a woman. Every time he tried to wrap his mind around the idea it shied off somewhere else as fast as it could. That was pretty much how he’d ended up on the roof. He’d just needed to get out of his mother’s head for a while.
Trying to block it out hadn’t helped. Much as he’d rather not admit it, he was curious. Standing looking at himself in the full-length mirror only made him more so. He certainly didn’t look pregnant. Dean turned sideways. Nope, no baby bump yet. Mom was gorgeous; he looked hot, he thought with satisfaction. There was no getting around it; there were great genes on both sides of the family. It explained him. Sammy? Well, that was another matter.
He smoothed his hands over his stomach. Exploring. ‘Hey, little Dean,’ he whispered. ‘How are you doing in there? I know this must kind of bizarre for you, especially as Mom’s not here at the moment. I guess you know that I’m you, right? Uh … anyway I just wanted to tell you not to worry, I may not be her, but I know all about kids. Hell, I pretty much raised Sammy. Oh, you haven’t met him yet. He’s going to be your bratty kid brother. Don’t take any shit from him, okay? He’s a major geek, but trust me, you’ll kind of get used to having him around. Plus he’s really good at Latin, and all the research. You’re going to need that later on. But you don’t want to hear about that now. Sammy’s here too, inside Dad, which is kind of confusing, but don’t worry, between us we’ll be able to fix it. So you just settle down, and kick back and chill, okay?’ Dean stroked his stomach gently as he settled into the comfy armchair next to the window.
‘I bet Mom has been singing to you since she found out you were riding shotgun. I might have been young but I remember that. Even Dad used to sing in the car before …’ Disturbed at that train of thought he shifted in the chair, one hand still stroking; calming. ‘What was it she used to sing to us all the time? Oh yeah,
Where are you going my little one ... little one
Where are you going my baby ... my own
Turn around and you're young
Turn around and you're grown …’
♒
‘If you start calling it “wee Dean” I’m going to throw up,’ Sam said with a pouty look after he opened the door onto what he later described as Dean gushing his inner chick all over the baby and half the floor.
Dean patted him consolingly on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay Sammy, you’ll always be second in my heart after Mini Me.’ He was just thankful he’d stopped singing lullabies and had moved on to Meat Loaf before Sam had interrupted his musical montage. Sensibly Dean Junior seemed to agree with the idea that objects in the rear view mirror really might appear closer than they were.
Sam wrinkled his nose in response before snickering, ‘Nice flowers, Dean. Very uh … feminine.’
Dean decided it was safer to ignore his brother, and the embroidery flourishing along the side seams of his jeans. He stepped over the piles of discarded clothes and went back to rummaging in the closet, this time in quest of some more comfortable shoes. He groped amongst the boxes his mother had piled in a corner. Strappy, dainty sandals. Shoes with heels so high he’d need to clip an altimeter to his collar before he took off out the door in them. His Mom had a lot of great … um … shoes, but was it too much to ask that he never have to wear heels again? Hang on. That last big box felt oddly weighty. He pulled it towards him and slid the lid off to find a leather satchel tucked neatly inside.
‘What?’ Sam asked from over his shoulder.
‘Well, I don’t think it’s Mom’s secret handbag collection,’ Dean said as he dragged the box back out into the centre of the room.
He didn’t look up as Sam settled cross-legged on the floor next to him. He had an odd feeling about this, and could tell from his brother’s tenseness that he could sense something wrong too. Dean finally reached out and carefully lifted the heavy satchel out and placed it between them. After a minute he flipped the flap back and eased the contents onto the carpet. Fuck.
‘Is that?’
‘Uh huh,’ Dean answered, stating the obvious. Looked like their Mom was much more than a pretty face. A lot more so than either of them had ever imagined.
It was Sam who unrolled the bundle that comprised a gun securely fastened inside its shoulder harness, a cleaning kit, and enough spare ammunition to take out a small town. A harness that was definitely too small for their father’s frame.
‘This one’s just right,’ Dean said shakily as he slid his arms through the straps and felt the custom-shaped leather mould comfortably around his shoulders. When checked, the gun was fully loaded and though it was immaculately maintained, it had obviously seen a lot of use. What the hell?
‘Mom?’ Sam asked, confused.
‘Dunno, Sammy,’ Dean answered, attention now fixed on the last item he’d pulled from the bag. A large, flat, and intricately carved wooden chest.
‘Dean?’
‘It’ll be okay, Sammy,’ Dean said reassuringly as he unfastened the lid, opened it, and … stopped. A sea of white crystals. He dipped a finger in to touch, before bringing it up to taste what he knew all too well. Salt, a whole box filled to the brim with ... more than salt. He sifted the hidden contents free, bringing a small drawstring pouch, and a curved leather sheath to the surface as he heard Sam take a sudden awed breath.
The same knife their father had given Sammy on his thirteenth birthday, simply saying, “Learn it. Keep it.” And Sammy had; cherishing it like no other weapon he ever handled. He’d only used it twice that Dean knew of, both times with a fervent, almost brutal effectiveness, and pure intensity that it almost frightened Dean. On a positive side neither of Dean’s attackers had lasted more than a minute after Sam unsheathed it. It had, and always would be, Sam’s last resort; the weapon he brought out when he had no other choice, or the stakes were simply too high.
The look on Sam’s face now as he held his knife up, delighting in the light angling off its cool surface, said it all. Dean knew what Sam wanted so badly to do. ‘Later, Sam. Now’s not the time.’ Sam just nodded as he fastened the knife to his belt. He wasn’t going to be going anywhere without it.
Dean didn’t need to open the next item. None of it made any sense, but he knew, somehow they both knew what was in it; his amulet. The same amulet Sammy had given him that Christmas. The one Bobby had meant for their father. Or had he?
‘You might as well put it on,’ Sam said softly, prising Dean’s right hand open, and easing the pouch free. ‘I think it’s missed you.’
That comment shouldn’t have made such an impact on Dean. He knew exactly how the amulet felt even if it was logically only meeting him - both of him - for the first time.
Somehow, here they were, all these years earlier, their two relics, united together under the twin shields of salt and their mother’s protection.
Dean knew it was superstitious, but he needed this moment to echo the first, no matter how silly that might sound. He looked mutely at his brother. You do it.
In harmony with Dean’s thoughts Sam leant forward to brush the amulet in fleeting benediction across their mother’s stomach before lowering it over his head with a whispered ‘… take this.’
As the comforting weight settled on his chest once more, Dean relaxed properly for the first time since Sisomso. Safe.
‘Mom was a ... hunter?’ Sam asked as he made an unnecessary adjustment to the amulet before lowering his hands again.
‘Looks like,’ Dean answered more calmly than he felt. Everything they thought they knew about their family had just been swept away.
‘Did Dad … know?’
There was the never-ending question of the century. Did you Dad? Were you both hunters from the start? Why couldn’t you tell us that? Or was this Mom’s secret? Her other life, hidden away. When did you find out, Dad? Before, or after? Or much later? It explained so much, and all too little.
As Dean’s eyes filled with sudden easy tears - damn the hormones for making him so emotional - he had no answers.
♒
Dean’s answer to absolutely everything his entire life had always been action. If he’d ever taken the time to think about it he might have blamed it first on whatever had killed their mother and swept them into this incessant cycle of vengeance, then on his father’s “take no prisoners” attitude to hunting, and finally on his own frantic need to keep moving, in the futile hope that one of these days he’d get there first, before anybody could get hurt. Or it might just be the fact that watching Sam sit still with a book, seemingly oblivious to his presence, for more than two minutes drove him so fucking crazy he just had to do something. In the end, as always, it came back to Sam.
Watching his brother struggling to comprehend the mystery that was their mother, Dean’s automatic response was to ignore his own pain and try to fix things. This? It wasn’t something he could put right any time soon. So Dean chose the next best option. ‘Let’s go kill Harvey for good this time.’
Sam blinked back to attention. ‘Do you mind if I hold him down long enough to find us a way out of this?’
Nerds. Always with the picky details. ‘You can practice your interrogation techniques on the way, Sam. I vote you go for speed over style this time.’
Sam just sniffed disdainfully. It wasn’t an expression Dean could ever recall seeing on his father’s face. In that single moment he would have given anything to see the real John Winchester looking back at him for a measly thirteen seconds, or even five.
Dean shrugged that wish aside. ‘Let’s hit the road and do it. Sam and Dean, Bonnie and Clyde …’
‘John and Mary?’
Dean’s voice softened. ‘Yeah. Mom and Dad. Let’s do it.’
♒
Part 8