Many thanks to balder12 and jennytork for the speedy beta!

Written for spnspiration's April Fool Challenge for citrusjava's prompt - Dean, Sam, the Impala, music, shapeshift.

Let me take you there

:::

She woke up one morning and everything was different.

Like so many things, it was Dean's fault. Incrementally, fundamentally, down to Dean.

Mainly. John contributed, but then that was largely because Dean was there at the start when he shouldn't have been, and it was Dean who'd steered his father to choose her over any of the other vehicles in that lot.

It was Dean who loved her, and Dean who brought her back to life on more than one occasion. And so, inevitably, it was Dean who sang her into being over the years, to a soundtrack of AC/DC, Zeppelin and Metallica.

Dean fuelled her, fed her, polished and adored her until her darkness shone bright as the sun. But, strangely, it was Sam who made her realize who she really was and, more importantly, what she was capable of.

:::

The Bunker was good. Its garage was well equipped and Baby approved of many things about it – like the cover it afforded her from the snow, rain and wind that had swept unhindered across the motel parking lots she was used to. Dean was happy to tinker with her there, tuning her engine, buffing her chrome until a single fingerprint was an offense.

But.

She was lonely.

She'd clocked over hundreds of thousand miles in her lifetime, yet since her boys had found this place, she'd barely moved.

The internal door to the garage opened and she perked up. Finally. Perhaps there was a case – maybe it would be in Montana, or Colorado, or better still, Washington. Somewhere that would mean hours of driving, listening to her boys breathing and more rarely, talking, in between the cassette tapes and the radio.

She longed for the open road.

But the footsteps that she heard were Sam's rather than Dean's, and she was disappointed. A disappointment that amplified when she recognized the second set of footsteps as Castiel. It was unlikely those two would be driving far without Dean.

Still, in her opinion outside was better than inside, so her engine purred as Sam's giant foot pressed on her gas pedal. She was distracted from the frustrating fact that Sam was driving her at exactly the legal speed limit into Lebanon, when Sam started talking about Dean.

Her boys were maddening to be around sometimes. Conversations were not their forte, so though she'd heard snatches here and there about Cain, and a Mark, and Dean being in trouble (again), Baby hadn't understood exactly how bad things were until Sam decided now was a good time to discuss matters with the angel. Baby was still confused about where Castiel fit, but for the moment he seemed to be part of her family, so she accepted his presence. And sometimes, like now, he had his uses. He was a good listener.

"I don't know what to do, Cas. He's hurting, and supressing like crazy, of course. But I've researched until I can't fucking see to read, and there's nothing. A whole library of fuck all use, and nothing on the entire internet about how to remove the Mark. He's scared, Cas, and so am I."

Baby coughed and nearly stalled, not enough air in her carburettor all of a sudden. She was used to Dean cussing, but it was a sign of just how concerned Sam was to hear him swear like this. Luckily Sam didn't notice her reaction, he was too busy talking.

Sam parked her somewhat haphazardly in the supermarket lot, which would have made Dean wince. Sam and Castiel got out and walked away, absorbed in their discussion, leaving her alone.

Baby pondered. Remembered.

She shouldn't be able to think at all, let alone feel. Baby understood that she was a machine, and a pretty basic one at that – yet here she was, not only cognizant, but fucking worried. The clock on her dash ticked over one minute, two, three, while she considered her place in the world.

When she'd rolled off that Detroit production line she'd been like every other Impala constructed in that factory. Inert, lifeless, merely a lump of beaten steel and shiny chrome.

Now she had heart, and a mind of her own, and flames in her innermost workings lit by more than a few electrical impulses in her spark plugs. She had options.

She fired her engine, reversed deftly out of the space and gunned it down the road back to the Bunker, wondering why she'd never taken control like this before. She'd been passive long enough.

In her rear view she saw the unmistakable long-limbed figure of Sam emerge from the building, no doubt alerted by her distinctive voice. He waved frantically, before running after her. She sped up and watched him grow smaller and smaller until he disappeared from view altogether. No matter. Sam was a big boy and he could find his own way home. She had work to do.

:::

The bunker felt empty without Sam and Cas in it.

Dean had pretended to be asleep, trying to make Sam feel better, but it was a lie – he seemed to spend so much time faking it these days. The Mark didn't let him rest. It was the unscratchable itch, the infection in his blood without a cure, the death sentence without reprieve. He paced the corridors because he couldn't bear to be still, until he turned a corner and came face to face with a small area of smashed up tiles, right around his eye level. The blood drained from his face as he recognised the impact shape of a claw hammer, his ears echoing with the sound of his own voice. Maybe I like the disease…

He turned, almost running, moving blindly, until his steps brought him to the closed doors of the firing range. Perfect. Shooting something, even if it was only a paper target, might help relieve some of the pressure.

He began with his favourite Colt, shooting until his ears rang and the air was thick with cordite. It was too easy. His aim wasn't always perfect but it was close enough. The long years of practice honed his skill – his arm and hand and eye so synchronised the bullets flew without thought or effort. There was no distraction in this.

Dean put the gun down, its barrel still warm, and looked around for something else. His attention was snagged by the rack of knives. Yeah, that would do. It'd been a while.

He set up a new target and picked up an unfamilar ivory-handled throwing knife. The balance was good, and the handle felt snug and warm in his palm as his fingers curled round the grip. The Mark's constant subliminal whine faded and all he could hear was Dad's voice. Don't let anything disturb you now, son. Concentrate on your breathing and on feeling the blade as an extension of your arm…

Dean's breathing steadied and his pulse slowed as all his attention focused on the target. The steel blade glittered as it flew. Dean was a blur of motion as he emptied the knife rack one after the other, sending each blade unerringly into the sawdust stuffed dummy until there was barely an inch of canvas sacking visible between the knife handles sticking out. Dean didn't notice the sweat trickling down his face, or the slight sound of a door opening behind him, but the faint click of a heel on concrete had him spinning round so fast it was a miracle he managed to stop his hand from releasing the last knife – square into the chest of the person who'd interrupted him. Fortunately his brain kicked in at the last second before release, realising it had to be Sam or Cas.

It took another second for it to dawn on him that it wasn't either his brother or his friend standing before him, and to drop back into a fighting stance. All the Zen of a few moments before vanished as the Mark shot a flare of sizzling rage through his veins.

"Who the hell are you and how the fuck did you get in here?"

:::

Baby stared. She fought down an initial annoyance that Dean didn't recognise her, before she acknowledged that maybe she'd expected too much of him. After all, she'd barely recognised herself when she'd seen her transformed reflection in the shiny door of the mint 1958 Dodge Custom Royal Regal Lancer in the bay next to where she'd parked herself on arriving back at the Bunker. 1967 Impalas were big cars, and Baby had morphed into a big woman.

She thought she looked good, but in purely human terms, she probably appeared – daunting.

Not that her boy looked particularly daunted. In fact, he looked like he was gearing up to do something stupid that would end up in him getting hurt. It was time to properly road test this strange human shape she'd morphed into after deciding Something Needed To Be Done, and that she appeared to be the only one capable of Doing It.

"You know me, Dean," she said. She gestured at her body. "You made me."

Dean didn't lower the knife, but neither did he attack her, so she thought that was a good start. She didn't think Dean could harm her with a blade, but she would rather not find out the hard way what the limits of her powers were.

"What do you mean, I made you?"

Baby remembered now – Dean wasn't always very good at seeing the obvious. This might have been easier to explain if Sam had been here, and for a moment she regretted abandoning him at the Wal-Mart. Finding words was proving harder than she had expected. Her vocabulary had been shaped by years of Winchester conversations that were carried out largely via significant looks, pointless bickering and the occasional discussion about a case. Other than that, she could draw on the inanity of DJs chatter on local radio stations and Dean's cassette collection, and she wasn't entirely sure the sum of those words was up to the job. Still you gotta get up and try, and try, and try, right?

"Remember when we Rode down the highway, Broke the limit, we hit the town, Went through to Texas, yeah Texas, and we had some fun – Richardson? The tulpa?"

"The tulpa, yeah, 'course I remember…wait. Did you just quote Thunderstruck?" Dean was gaping a bit now. It wasn't a good look on him.

"Hear my song. People won't you listen now?" she said, frustrated.

She tried to think, find a way to explain, but all that came out was a declaration she hadn't intended to make. "My love is strong, with you there is no wrong, together we shall go until we die. My, my, my. An inspiration is what you are to me, inspiration, look... see."

"Holy shit… Baby?"

Finally. He seemed to have got it. She smiled and nodded.

"You're a tulpa? What, I thought you into being? That's just crazy."

"Crazy in love, huh? I think I'm more a goddess on a hiway than a tulpa, though."

"Oh no, no, no, you cannot be quoting Beyonce at me now, that's just wrong. And don't think Mercury Rev gets you a pass."

Baby shrugged. Whatever worked, she didn't care. She just wanted to help him, to do something for him before he faded any further from existence. Over the last few years she'd watched, helpless as he turned into a pale copy of the boy that she had nurtured and sheltered since he was a baby. Sam too. Both Winchesters were growing fainter, more transparent, like the shadows of trees in mist, caught in her headlights.

"Come with me, come with me…The feeling's free, just come with me," she said, hoping Waylon Jennings was a better bet than Beyonce. This communication business was proving to be much harder than she'd anticipated.

Dean lowered the knife and cocked his head to one side, considering. After a few moments of careful scrutiny he seemed to come to a decision.

"Fuck, I need a drink. All right then," he said. "Let's move this to the war room and talk."

Baby was in complete agreement about the talking if not the drinking, and followed him happily. She allowed Dean to usher her through the maze of the corridors, her ability to find her way lost now that Dean was with her. She'd located him earlier purely through instinct, drawn to him as if he was the destination programmed into one of those new-fangled sat-navs; like the one Sam had installed the first time Dean was gone. That had been a bad time for them both, her and Sam, a bad memory that she shoved aside now.

Their destination was a large chamber, surrounded by walls full of books and other objects whose purpose Baby wasn't sure about. This Bunker was full of human things she had no need for or knowledge of. Books she knew, she'd carried many of them, and understood their importance, especially to Sam. When Dean pulled out one of several similar-looking wooden things and told her to sit, she shook her head. Sitting was too complicated, and she had more important concerns right now – like how to get Dean to tell her everything. She searched through her memories for the right lyrics, the right words.

"Why don't you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see?" seemed to be the best she could come up with, so she went with that and hoped he'd understand what she was asking.

:::

After all these years of dealing with weird, Dean would have thought there was little left that could surprise him, yet here he was, trying to hold a conversation with the human embodiment of his car. And what a body she had – she was a big woman, taller than Sam. Her skin was so dark it was almost a true black. Dean guessed it was the closest you could get to car paint in human-skin terms. Her hair was dead straight, glossy as a magazine cover, and jet black except for two sweeps of silver white that framed her rather angular face. The silver of her eyes was eerie, set amid so much darkness.

All in all, Dean should have been freaking out, not wondering what had happened to his little green army man, or where on this body the initials he and Sam had carved were hidden. Even more surprising, when she asked him to talk about himself, he not only knew what she was asking of him, but he wanted to share. He wanted to tell her about the Mark, and Cain, and how he'd lost all hope of redemption in that barn in Ohio. So he did.

He talked more than he'd talked for months, maybe years. Maybe ever. He barely touched the whiskey he'd poured himself.

"I don't see any ending that ain't gonna be bad," he told her. He tried a self-depreciating smile but it soon turned crooked, so he dropped it. "Sammy thinks he can research me out of this hole, but we've read every book and tried every search on the net, and there's nothing there, Baby. No way out – drums, drums in the deep – you know?"

Baby's only response was to gesture at his arm, so he willingly rolled up his sleeve and showed her the Mark. He shivered when she ran a dusky finger over the angry scar tissue, her touch cool as metal. Up close, her breath smelled like exhaust fumes, and he could see that though she looked like a woman, all curves in the right places, her dark skin was smooth and lacked pores.

Dean didn't know why he trusted this creature, why he felt okay spilling his guts to her (it?) when he hadn't been able to talk to Sam or Cas. By all rights, he should've loaded his Colt with silver bullets and planted one right there and then, in the back of her glossy back head as they left the shooting range, instead of meekly stowing his gun in the back of his pants and trotting along after. Like a lovesick puppy, Crowley's bitter voice whispered inside his head. It was a voice Dean had a lot of practice ignoring – it was no hardship to ignore it now. Especially when the Impala (his Impala! What the fuck?) turned that strange silver gaze from his arm to his face.

"Stop checking out my chassis, boy. I'm a vintage model and deserve some respect."

A laugh surprised Dean, bubbling up from somewhere deep in his belly. He threw up both hands and gave her his best innocent expression.

"Okay, okay, not checking…but you've gotta admit, you've got great fenders…"

He caught a smile crossing Baby's angular features before she turned away, and then something else struck him. "Hey, you didn't have to use song lyrics then," he pointed out, and the Impala stopped in her tracks and turned to face him again. She raised a hand and tentatively touched her lips.

"It seems to be getting easier to find words," she acknowledged. She glanced around, then back at Dean.

"Let's go for a drive," she said, and her eyes literally lit up.

For the first time in what felt like months, the grin that cracked Dean's face felt real.

:::

"You wanna go for a drive? Okay then," Dean said, that unexpected but welcome big grin still in place, and Baby nodded with relief.

They'd talked enough here; she needed Dean to come with her. She knew now what she had to do, and it wasn't going to be easy. They needed to get somewhere reasonably remote so that Sam and Castiel couldn't interrupt, and she thought she knew just the place. Harlan County Lake. It wasn't far, just over the border and into Nebraska. They'd had a case there, a little while back, a water-horse. Dean had parked her right by the water's edge, so she'd been able to watch the whole thing for a change…she remembered the route there perfectly.

Negotiating the stairs to the exit on the other hand was an unanticipated challenge, but fortunately, the human form she'd chosen seemed to have built-in mechanisms to cope with both the concept and execution, and she made it to the top without incident.

Once outside of the building, Baby felt more at ease, and she sighed with pleasure when her feet touched the surface of the road that ran in front of the Bunker. She morphed back into her proper form then switched the radio on so she could talk.

"Get inside," the radio crackled, Baby putting as much pleading into her tone as she could manage. "When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move."

In the side mirrors, she could see Dean hesitate, then move towards the driver's door. The whisper of his denimed buttocks and thighs as they slid across the smooth leather of her seats was like coming home. Her engine warmed and started to purr as his familiar weight settled and she felt the heat of his hands gripping her steering wheel.

Nothing more was said for the hour and a half it took her to bring them to Harlan County Lake. Dean didn't even ask her where they were headed, just turned up the volume and sang along to every song she played for him. She steered well clear of Beyonce, stuck to the classics like Stairway to Heaven, Tangerine and You Shook Me. She sang out her love for Dean, and he sang it right back at her. It was perfect.

She took them all the way to the anonymous point on the lakeshore where the track ran out, then carried on across the hard-mud beach, glad of the dry winter and the rugged profile tires Dean had fitted her with. Eventually she reached the promontory called Indian Hill (it wasn't much of a hill, really) where she'd watched her boys lure the water horse to its deserved demise, and in her rear view mirror she saw the moment Dean recognised the place.

It was deserted. Indian Hill wasn't one of the places folk liked to fish, it was too inaccessible for the tourists and their water sports, and wasn't on any of the popular walking and off-road cycling routes – which was why the Winchesters had chosen it for their hunt before, and why Baby knew it would be okay for them now. Plus it was late in the day, and pretty damn chilly for March, all factors that kept people indoors and away from this particular stretch of muddy shore.

She idled, waiting for Dean to get out, before morphing back into her humanoid form. She walked across to join Dean where he was standing, looking out over the wind-ruffled surface of the lake.

"So," he said, without turning his head. "You gonna tell me what we're doing here?"

He didn't sound anxious, more curious. It gave her hope that this could all work out, though she was shivering in the wind in this puny body. Being human had many drawbacks, she'd found in her brief experience.

"The Mark," she said. Dean turned to face her then. The setting sun's rays gilded his skin so he shone like gold. He looked like a god. He raised one eyebrow, waiting.

"Show me the Mark again," she said, and waited while he undid the cuff on his jacket, and rolled up all his layers to expose the scar to the dying light. He held his arm out and she reached out and grasped his wrist. He looked into her eyes, startled like a deer caught in her headlights, and she thought maybe he was starting to understand her purpose.

"You said the Mark can be handed over, person to person," she said and he nodded slowly, his eyes wide. "So," she said, "hand it to me. Now, while I'm human. I will keep it safe for you."

"I don't think …" he said, but Baby wasn't willing to listen to doubts.

"Then don't," she told him. "Don't think, just act. Do it."

The scar decided for him. It started glowing red as her rear lights, as if it was gathering all the energy of the dying sun. It writhed and began to flow down his veins and she could feel the heat of it burning her human shell. Emotions washed over her, hotter than the combustion she was used to, filling her with pure rage. She shook with it, and could feel Dean trembling with the strain. His breathing was getting short and loud, and through the red haze that filled her eyes, she could see sweat rolling down his face. She wanted to take his pain away, but she'd settle for taking the Mark instead.

Then Dean was falling, pulling her down with him. She knew she had succeeded. She could feel that the transfer was complete, so she let go, letting Dean drop the last few inches to sprawl in the dirt at her feet. She thought she could see his chest moving and she hoped he was okay, but she couldn't linger long enough to find out. If her plan was to work, she had to move, and move quickly.

She turned north and started walking into the lake. Steam rose where her skin touched the liquid, but she didn't feel any cooler. The water was up to her knees, then her thighs, her waist…when it reached her neck, it was time to change. Feeling the lake-bed slope steeply before her, she returned to her true form and allowed the weight of her solid steel construction pull her deeper and deeper.

Relief covered her along with the lake waters. The fire of the Mark etched deep into her driver's door was quenched, robbed of life not by drowning, but by her purely mechanical nature.

Her inner radio still played and of course, it had to be Kashmir.

All I see turns to brown, as the sun burns the ground
And my eyes fill with sand, as I scan this wasted land
Trying to find, trying to find where I've been.

It was worth it. Dean was worth it. After rebuilding her so many times, it was her turn to save him. Filled with nothing but the satisfaction of a job well done and a long journey concluded, Baby let her consciousness slip away and her engine fill with silt.

:::

A/N: Fic title from Kashmir

Song titles and quotes in order of appearance:

Pink – Try

AC/DC – Thunderstruck

Led Zeppelin – The Song remains the Same

Led Zeppelin – Thank You

Beyonce – Crazy in Love

Mercury Rev – Goddess on a Hiway

Waylon Jennings – Come With Me

Led Zeppelin – Misty Mountain Hop

Led Zeppelin – When the Levee Breaks

Led Zeppelin – Kashmir