A mari usque ad mare - Part 9 (10/14)
A mari usque ad mare - Part 9 (10/14)
2,305/28,777 of R rated Gen (with an edge of subtext) crack!fic in which Dean revisits his past in unexpected ways. (Dean has a little list, and he’s on it)
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 9
Solvation
‘You should have let me kill him,’ Dean said. He was driving with a fierce, fixed concentration as if the Impala was the only thing holding them together. ‘We can still go back.’
30th July 1977 - Marianne Grossman & Alan Willis
‘No,’ Sam said quietly. ‘We can’t change this.’
Can’t change the past? Just ... let me.
‘It’s going to happen, Dean.’
31st March 1980 - Patricia Day & Gilbert Jones
‘It already has in our time.’
30th December 1982 - Sara Michaels …
‘We have to let it be.’
31st July 2004 - David Reid & Lucas O’Connell
‘Do you want to be stuck here in the past?’
30th June 2007 - Sam & Dean Winchester
‘As a woman? As Mom? Until the demon comes? I won’t let that happen, Dean. I’m not letting it destroy you too.’
2nd November 1983 - Mary Winchester
2nd November 2006 - John Winchester
13th June 1978 - Mary & John Winchester
June 1978 - Sam & Dean Winchester
Sam …
‘Do you want to die, Dean?
No.
♒
‘What did you say to him at the end, Dean?’
‘Before he started screaming?’
‘Yes,’ Sam said.
Remember. ‘I told him we’d be back.’
They left Sisomso with blood, but not death on their hands; at least, not yet.
♒
During the return trip, Dean and Sam had precisely zero arguments. None, nada, zip, a big round, fat not...
‘Dean, why do we need to stop again?’
Dean declined to answer again.
They could have done the trip in nine hours, thirteen if Dean had let Sam drive. So far they’d taken three days.
It wasn’t Dean’s fault.
Dean didn’t buy any dresses, or shoes, though there had been that one fabulous bag ...
It wasn’t Dean’s fault at all. Not entirely. He just had to stop. So far, he’d managed to be very creative about the reasons. Sam had seemed to believe most of them, or at least for the first day and a half.
Or maybe Sam was just choosing his moment. Unfortunately it came while Dean was bent over the engine pretending to adjust the Impala’s alleged rough timing. He’d been busy fiddling with the screwdriver - quarter turn this way, quarter back - while Sam lounged disconcertingly close against the front bumper. Over-protective much lately, Sam? It made it harder to keep his eye on his real target, that damned crow, raven, whatever the fuck it was that always seemed to be just out of the corner of his eye, whenever, and wherever they stopped. It was ridiculous, but Dean was beginning to feel that it was the same bird. Dean knew that wasn’t possible, but the coincidences were beginning to make him twitchy. He was strongly considering announcing open season on anything with feathers. The season didn’t need to be a long one, about eight seconds ought to do it.
Dean was stretching up, and showing a good amount of bare flesh, to release the hood back down when it happened. Dean took the wolf-whistles from the passing car in stride; hell, he’d had his share of those from girls over the years. The yelled suggestions of exactly what he could do with that fine ass were another matter. Because that was his mother’s body they were ogling. His instant reaction was to jump in the car, chase after them and beat them to a pulp. For once, commonsense ruled. That and the fact that he was busy trying to hold Sam back. A Sam who was spitting furious curses that quickly scaled up from ‘can’t talk about my mother like that’ to ‘that’s my brother, you assholes!’ and ‘catch you and make you eat those words with a bullet!’ into the speeding car’s dust.
You see, after Dean had got over the shock of being his Mom, he’d thought he was dealing with the whole situation pretty calmly, and had even managed to work it to his advantage in that bar as if he’d been wearing a girl body his entire life. Apart from a few jokes, both he and Sam had soon been able to ignore their parent’s facades, and behave as usual around each other. That’s if you could call anything about their dangerously entwined lives normal, even before this.
Except obviously all that was a load of crap. Nothing about any of this was normal. It was screwing with their emotions in every possible way. Their responses were all over the place. Every single word and action somehow acquired so many new layers of meaning and confusion that neither of them had a clue what the other was really thinking or feeling. They were oil and water waiting for a match.
♒
Preventing a fight actually turned out to be a bad idea, as yet another one of Sam’s too tightly wound reins snapped. It shouldn’t have shocked Dean as much as it did. He was the one known for losing it, for getting into (okay, starting for the sheer hell of it) a world of fights in and out of bars. Sam, well, it wasn’t that Sam didn’t get into fights - witness that recent punch up - but Sam (apart from that one miraculous time in Syracuse) always had a reason. But the two of them were more alike than it seemed on the surface. Dean of all people knew that.
In retrospect, possibly Dean should have just let Sam go. Let them both chase after the hoons and get everything out of their systems. Unfortunately another thing they had in common was stubbornness. So Dean kept holding on - protecting; and Sam just let loose.
Maybe a fight was what they’d both been waiting for.
Dean could tell the second Sam remembered. He didn’t stop, he was too much of a Winchester for that, but he did start pulling his punches. That just made Dean want to pound him into the ground with frustration, so he tried to flip him instead. Even allowing for technique and experience not many women were capable of bringing John Winchester down. Mary was undoubtedly a minority of one. Except that somewhere along the way Sam held on, and so did Dean, both of them typically hell-bent on shielding the other. Naturally it didn’t end well. The impact broke them apart, and for several minutes all either of them could do was lie there in the dirt and breathe. It was the longest real conversation they’d had in months.
‘Ow!’
‘Baby.’
‘Well, duh!’ Dean snorted wishing they’d chosen somewhere other than the side of the road to have a fight. Somewhere a lot softer.
‘Oh shit, Dean.’ Sam was on top of him in a second, patting him down, checking for injuries.
Heh. Made you forget again. ‘Uh, Sam? Do you want to reconsider the touchy-feely first aid? Because I am a girl, and Mom.’ There, that ought to do it.
Yup. That got Sam off him fast.
‘I’m fine. I’m only a little bit pregnant, and all three of me are Winchesters after all.’
Sam was helping him up, all concerned frowns. Chivalrous, macho, bastard. ‘Are we?’
Fine? ‘Yeah.’ Now. ‘But if you ever hold back in a fight again, I’ll shoot you.’ Which was Winchester for ‘I love you, you big geek.’
♒
‘Damn it, now I’ve lost Donald,’ Dean spat out.
‘Who?’
‘The crow!’ Dean yelled, pointing at the uninhabited tree beside them.
‘You have a pet crow?’ Sam asked, flummoxed. ‘When … ho … what?’
‘Not a pet, a stalker!’ Dean was stomping around the tree now, daring it to show itself.
‘You have a stalker? You think a crow is stalking you? And you named it Donald?’ There was no justification for the snicker winding through Sam’s voice. None at all.
‘It had feathers, what was I supposed to name it?’ Dean asked sensibly.
‘Uh, Dean? You know Donald was a duck, don’t you?’
‘Shut up.’
♒
Afterwards, Dean preferred not to think that maybe Sam had just been humouring him because he didn’t want to have to slap Sam. Sam had listened to his suspicions about the crow; he’d even nodded once or twice as if some of it made sense.
He had also refused point blank to let them stick around any longer and lay a trap in case Donald came back on a reconnaissance flight.
After that, Dean got back behind the wheel and flatly refused to consider changing drivers for the rest of the trip. Sam tried all manner of persuasion. Who knew Sam could be that tricky? Still, none of that mattered. Dean was in control. Sam was successfully distracted from worrying about how to break the curse, at least until they got back to Lawrence which would come soon enough. Dean used the next two days to start working out a hell of a lot of Plan B’s. Remember. And if he kept a watchful eye out for Donald, no one knew that but him.
The rest of the trip went quietly, if you discounted the slight mix up over the motel room beds two nights in a row. And Dean still needed to stop, he just didn’t bother concealing the reasons why any more.
Sam wasn’t arguing. At all. All he did was ask the one question. He asked it calmly, quietly, and continuously, for the entire trip.
‘Are we there yet?’
And they weren’t arguing at all. No, they weren’t.
None of it was Dean’s fault.
It was the baby’s.
♒
‘Katadesmoi.’
‘Bless you.’
‘Very funny, Dean. Defixiones, curse tablets, call them what you will, but somehow Graham managed to get a hold of one that had more than superstition behind it. It was dedicated to Sulis, and had a very strong binding in it. With what he added on?’ Sam shook his head. ‘If he’d wanted to he could have contaminated the entire water supply of the springs, and with the amount they were bottling and shipping interstate, well, we could have had an even bigger problem on our hands.’
‘Gee, I’m so glad he was a selective psychopath,’ Dean said sarcastically. ‘So what about our little problem then?’
‘I’ve managed to work out what he didn’t tell us.’
Dean just growled. He still really wanted to kill Graham, and not have to wait thirty years to see Sam do it for him.
‘That doodle, for instance.’
‘What doodle?’
‘Remember after I killed Graham?’
‘Mmm,’ Dean murmured, going for noncommittal because he was struggling not to start yelling something silly like ‘You got to kill him then, why didn’t I get a turn?’ Even Dean knew when to shut up.
‘How little we found?’
Dean nodded. It was weird, Graham had had a ton of stuff all over when they got there, including that damning photograph, but in the future there had been almost nothing. Nothing that made any sense anyway. ‘Oh shit.’
‘Yeah. We took it Dean. All the evidence we needed in the future to work out exactly what he was doing before we got caught in the curse? It wasn’t there because we just took it from his house, inthis time.’
‘So back, I mean ahead then, uh, in our time, we’ve already been here in the past, and changed things.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘I thought you said we weren’t supposed to change things?’
‘I did. But if we were already here, then we didn’t change things, we just did what we did before.’ Sam said a lot more after that, but it made even less sense to Dean so he ignored it, because one thing Sam learned as a Winchester, even before he went to college, was the importance of a nice concise summary. Dean knew if he waited long enough Sam would wake him with the bullet points. And he did.
Adam & Eve = holy springs Curse tablet = bad mojo Blue moon = superconductor Flower doodle = sunflower Numbers = Fibonacci sequence Blood magic = run really fast All of it together? = mind wipe
Sam’s bullet points were actually much more technical, Dean preferred his own list. He still wasn’t sure if he’d grasped the reasons behind the flower and the maths and some golden spiral that Sammy was getting all geeky about, but he knew one thing. ‘That’s how he got everyone else. It still doesn’t explain us.’
‘I’m still not sure,’ Sammy said. ‘We should have been the thirteenth set of victims. You definitely got hit by the curse, I saw it take you before I got sucked in too. But we didn’t lose our memories; we got shifted, through space and time. We got sent back almost thirty years and arrived in the same month, which makes some sense, but we left on the 30th and got here on the 13th. There’s no way it’s something as simple as a link between the two thirteens.’
‘We got back home. To Kansas. That has to mean something.’
Sam agreed. ‘If it was just some sort of magical power surge that sent us through time we should have still ended up in Sisomso. Lawrence? That’s a hell of an overshoot. Something drew us here, or something sent us. Question is why?’
‘At this stage I don’t care why. I just want us out of here,’ Dean said. He had a few ideas, but they were so twisted and out there, that he couldn’t admit them out loud yet, especially after Sam’s reaction to Donald.
‘If we found out what, and why, it might give us a shortcut home,’ Sam said without much hope.
‘You work out how to get us out of here, and leave the rest to me. When we go, I’m driving. Trust me, I’ll find a shortcut.’
♒
Part 10
2,305/28,777 of R rated Gen (with an edge of subtext) crack!fic in which Dean revisits his past in unexpected ways. (Dean has a little list, and he’s on it)
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 9
Solvation
‘You should have let me kill him,’ Dean said. He was driving with a fierce, fixed concentration as if the Impala was the only thing holding them together. ‘We can still go back.’
30th July 1977 - Marianne Grossman & Alan Willis
‘No,’ Sam said quietly. ‘We can’t change this.’
Can’t change the past? Just ... let me.
‘It’s going to happen, Dean.’
31st March 1980 - Patricia Day & Gilbert Jones
‘It already has in our time.’
30th December 1982 - Sara Michaels …
‘We have to let it be.’
31st July 2004 - David Reid & Lucas O’Connell
‘Do you want to be stuck here in the past?’
30th June 2007 - Sam & Dean Winchester
‘As a woman? As Mom? Until the demon comes? I won’t let that happen, Dean. I’m not letting it destroy you too.’
2nd November 1983 - Mary Winchester
2nd November 2006 - John Winchester
13th June 1978 - Mary & John Winchester
June 1978 - Sam & Dean Winchester
Sam …
‘Do you want to die, Dean?
No.
♒
‘What did you say to him at the end, Dean?’
‘Before he started screaming?’
‘Yes,’ Sam said.
Remember. ‘I told him we’d be back.’
They left Sisomso with blood, but not death on their hands; at least, not yet.
♒
During the return trip, Dean and Sam had precisely zero arguments. None, nada, zip, a big round, fat not...
‘Dean, why do we need to stop again?’
Dean declined to answer again.
They could have done the trip in nine hours, thirteen if Dean had let Sam drive. So far they’d taken three days.
It wasn’t Dean’s fault.
Dean didn’t buy any dresses, or shoes, though there had been that one fabulous bag ...
It wasn’t Dean’s fault at all. Not entirely. He just had to stop. So far, he’d managed to be very creative about the reasons. Sam had seemed to believe most of them, or at least for the first day and a half.
Or maybe Sam was just choosing his moment. Unfortunately it came while Dean was bent over the engine pretending to adjust the Impala’s alleged rough timing. He’d been busy fiddling with the screwdriver - quarter turn this way, quarter back - while Sam lounged disconcertingly close against the front bumper. Over-protective much lately, Sam? It made it harder to keep his eye on his real target, that damned crow, raven, whatever the fuck it was that always seemed to be just out of the corner of his eye, whenever, and wherever they stopped. It was ridiculous, but Dean was beginning to feel that it was the same bird. Dean knew that wasn’t possible, but the coincidences were beginning to make him twitchy. He was strongly considering announcing open season on anything with feathers. The season didn’t need to be a long one, about eight seconds ought to do it.
Dean was stretching up, and showing a good amount of bare flesh, to release the hood back down when it happened. Dean took the wolf-whistles from the passing car in stride; hell, he’d had his share of those from girls over the years. The yelled suggestions of exactly what he could do with that fine ass were another matter. Because that was his mother’s body they were ogling. His instant reaction was to jump in the car, chase after them and beat them to a pulp. For once, commonsense ruled. That and the fact that he was busy trying to hold Sam back. A Sam who was spitting furious curses that quickly scaled up from ‘can’t talk about my mother like that’ to ‘that’s my brother, you assholes!’ and ‘catch you and make you eat those words with a bullet!’ into the speeding car’s dust.
You see, after Dean had got over the shock of being his Mom, he’d thought he was dealing with the whole situation pretty calmly, and had even managed to work it to his advantage in that bar as if he’d been wearing a girl body his entire life. Apart from a few jokes, both he and Sam had soon been able to ignore their parent’s facades, and behave as usual around each other. That’s if you could call anything about their dangerously entwined lives normal, even before this.
Except obviously all that was a load of crap. Nothing about any of this was normal. It was screwing with their emotions in every possible way. Their responses were all over the place. Every single word and action somehow acquired so many new layers of meaning and confusion that neither of them had a clue what the other was really thinking or feeling. They were oil and water waiting for a match.
♒
Preventing a fight actually turned out to be a bad idea, as yet another one of Sam’s too tightly wound reins snapped. It shouldn’t have shocked Dean as much as it did. He was the one known for losing it, for getting into (okay, starting for the sheer hell of it) a world of fights in and out of bars. Sam, well, it wasn’t that Sam didn’t get into fights - witness that recent punch up - but Sam (apart from that one miraculous time in Syracuse) always had a reason. But the two of them were more alike than it seemed on the surface. Dean of all people knew that.
In retrospect, possibly Dean should have just let Sam go. Let them both chase after the hoons and get everything out of their systems. Unfortunately another thing they had in common was stubbornness. So Dean kept holding on - protecting; and Sam just let loose.
Maybe a fight was what they’d both been waiting for.
Dean could tell the second Sam remembered. He didn’t stop, he was too much of a Winchester for that, but he did start pulling his punches. That just made Dean want to pound him into the ground with frustration, so he tried to flip him instead. Even allowing for technique and experience not many women were capable of bringing John Winchester down. Mary was undoubtedly a minority of one. Except that somewhere along the way Sam held on, and so did Dean, both of them typically hell-bent on shielding the other. Naturally it didn’t end well. The impact broke them apart, and for several minutes all either of them could do was lie there in the dirt and breathe. It was the longest real conversation they’d had in months.
‘Ow!’
‘Baby.’
‘Well, duh!’ Dean snorted wishing they’d chosen somewhere other than the side of the road to have a fight. Somewhere a lot softer.
‘Oh shit, Dean.’ Sam was on top of him in a second, patting him down, checking for injuries.
Heh. Made you forget again. ‘Uh, Sam? Do you want to reconsider the touchy-feely first aid? Because I am a girl, and Mom.’ There, that ought to do it.
Yup. That got Sam off him fast.
‘I’m fine. I’m only a little bit pregnant, and all three of me are Winchesters after all.’
Sam was helping him up, all concerned frowns. Chivalrous, macho, bastard. ‘Are we?’
Fine? ‘Yeah.’ Now. ‘But if you ever hold back in a fight again, I’ll shoot you.’ Which was Winchester for ‘I love you, you big geek.’
♒
‘Damn it, now I’ve lost Donald,’ Dean spat out.
‘Who?’
‘The crow!’ Dean yelled, pointing at the uninhabited tree beside them.
‘You have a pet crow?’ Sam asked, flummoxed. ‘When … ho … what?’
‘Not a pet, a stalker!’ Dean was stomping around the tree now, daring it to show itself.
‘You have a stalker? You think a crow is stalking you? And you named it Donald?’ There was no justification for the snicker winding through Sam’s voice. None at all.
‘It had feathers, what was I supposed to name it?’ Dean asked sensibly.
‘Uh, Dean? You know Donald was a duck, don’t you?’
‘Shut up.’
♒
Afterwards, Dean preferred not to think that maybe Sam had just been humouring him because he didn’t want to have to slap Sam. Sam had listened to his suspicions about the crow; he’d even nodded once or twice as if some of it made sense.
He had also refused point blank to let them stick around any longer and lay a trap in case Donald came back on a reconnaissance flight.
After that, Dean got back behind the wheel and flatly refused to consider changing drivers for the rest of the trip. Sam tried all manner of persuasion. Who knew Sam could be that tricky? Still, none of that mattered. Dean was in control. Sam was successfully distracted from worrying about how to break the curse, at least until they got back to Lawrence which would come soon enough. Dean used the next two days to start working out a hell of a lot of Plan B’s. Remember. And if he kept a watchful eye out for Donald, no one knew that but him.
The rest of the trip went quietly, if you discounted the slight mix up over the motel room beds two nights in a row. And Dean still needed to stop, he just didn’t bother concealing the reasons why any more.
Sam wasn’t arguing. At all. All he did was ask the one question. He asked it calmly, quietly, and continuously, for the entire trip.
‘Are we there yet?’
And they weren’t arguing at all. No, they weren’t.
None of it was Dean’s fault.
It was the baby’s.
♒
‘Katadesmoi.’
‘Bless you.’
‘Very funny, Dean. Defixiones, curse tablets, call them what you will, but somehow Graham managed to get a hold of one that had more than superstition behind it. It was dedicated to Sulis, and had a very strong binding in it. With what he added on?’ Sam shook his head. ‘If he’d wanted to he could have contaminated the entire water supply of the springs, and with the amount they were bottling and shipping interstate, well, we could have had an even bigger problem on our hands.’
‘Gee, I’m so glad he was a selective psychopath,’ Dean said sarcastically. ‘So what about our little problem then?’
‘I’ve managed to work out what he didn’t tell us.’
Dean just growled. He still really wanted to kill Graham, and not have to wait thirty years to see Sam do it for him.
‘That doodle, for instance.’
‘What doodle?’
‘Remember after I killed Graham?’
‘Mmm,’ Dean murmured, going for noncommittal because he was struggling not to start yelling something silly like ‘You got to kill him then, why didn’t I get a turn?’ Even Dean knew when to shut up.
‘How little we found?’
Dean nodded. It was weird, Graham had had a ton of stuff all over when they got there, including that damning photograph, but in the future there had been almost nothing. Nothing that made any sense anyway. ‘Oh shit.’
‘Yeah. We took it Dean. All the evidence we needed in the future to work out exactly what he was doing before we got caught in the curse? It wasn’t there because we just took it from his house, inthis time.’
‘So back, I mean ahead then, uh, in our time, we’ve already been here in the past, and changed things.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘I thought you said we weren’t supposed to change things?’
‘I did. But if we were already here, then we didn’t change things, we just did what we did before.’ Sam said a lot more after that, but it made even less sense to Dean so he ignored it, because one thing Sam learned as a Winchester, even before he went to college, was the importance of a nice concise summary. Dean knew if he waited long enough Sam would wake him with the bullet points. And he did.
Sam’s bullet points were actually much more technical, Dean preferred his own list. He still wasn’t sure if he’d grasped the reasons behind the flower and the maths and some golden spiral that Sammy was getting all geeky about, but he knew one thing. ‘That’s how he got everyone else. It still doesn’t explain us.’
‘I’m still not sure,’ Sammy said. ‘We should have been the thirteenth set of victims. You definitely got hit by the curse, I saw it take you before I got sucked in too. But we didn’t lose our memories; we got shifted, through space and time. We got sent back almost thirty years and arrived in the same month, which makes some sense, but we left on the 30th and got here on the 13th. There’s no way it’s something as simple as a link between the two thirteens.’
‘We got back home. To Kansas. That has to mean something.’
Sam agreed. ‘If it was just some sort of magical power surge that sent us through time we should have still ended up in Sisomso. Lawrence? That’s a hell of an overshoot. Something drew us here, or something sent us. Question is why?’
‘At this stage I don’t care why. I just want us out of here,’ Dean said. He had a few ideas, but they were so twisted and out there, that he couldn’t admit them out loud yet, especially after Sam’s reaction to Donald.
‘If we found out what, and why, it might give us a shortcut home,’ Sam said without much hope.
‘You work out how to get us out of here, and leave the rest to me. When we go, I’m driving. Trust me, I’ll find a shortcut.’
♒
Part 10