Disclaimer: Supernatural does not belong to me.

A/N: This story will be a collection of "canon-divergent AU" stories, with a brief description of the premise of each particular one-shot at the beginning of the chapter. There will be a mixture of stories with varying focuses on Dean, Sam, Cas, John, etc., and perhaps more than one story in each "verse."

Sam and Dean are itinerant hunters, crisscrossing the country and working only with Bobby, hoping that no one will discover their furry little secret.

The More I Learn About People

"I'm telling you, Sammy," Dean says through a mouthful of burger. "There's something there."

Sam scowls at Dean's disgusting eating, more out of habit than anything, as he takes the newspaper and scans the article. A hiker, Eddy Northcut, was snatched from a trail in the woods around White Rock, Maine. His girlfriend said a mountain lion did it.

"Seems like it could be an honest-to-god animal kill, Dean."

"Yeah, except for the part where five other hikers have gone missing from that town in the past three months, a town that usually has a total of exactly zero missing persons per year. And the part where they found his head a mile away from where he was attacked"—Dean leans in for the dramatic reveal—"squashed flat."

"Okay," Sam concedes, wolfing down his last few bites of salad. "This may be our kind of thing."

"Yeah, you think, Mr. Peabody?"

White Rock is a mid-size town on the edge of a plus-size forest. It gets almost all its revenue from tourism, which means that priority number one is stopping the disappearances, so when Sam and Dean roll up with State Ranger badges, they're all but given the keys to the city. Their first stop is the morgue, where they check out what's left of the body—very little, and the newspaper wasn't exaggerating about the whole flattened skull thing. Sam's seen a lot of surreal and disgusting stuff in his twenty-three years, but this is pretty high on the list. One glance and he has crossed wendigo, rugaru, black dog, and werewolf off his mental list. None of them have the inclination or the strength to do that to a human being.

"So what do we think?" Deans asks after they've peeled off their gloves and stepped out into the street. "Bigfoot got a hankering for some human pancakes?"

Sam snorts. "That's better than any theories I've got."

They walk about twenty feet and reach the edge of the woods, which Sam feels is an apt description of this town as a whole.

"So…I guess one of us interviews the girlfriend, and the other, you know, checks out the crime scene?" Dean taps his nose as he says "checks out" and looks at Sam expectantly, and Sam knows which of the two he's doing. He frowns. "C'mon, don't give me that look."

Dean stands guard as Sam ducks behind a copse of trees and slips out of his clothes, folding them up neatly. He's looked high and low, but he's never found a way to make the change without getting naked first that doesn't end with his dog form tangled up in jeans and flannel. The whole process, to Sam, is undignified and borderline humiliating. Dean, of course, thinks it's hilarious. The trees seem to grow and the colors to dim as he turns, dropping down to all fours and giving his tail an experimental wag.

"You good?" Dean calls out.

Sam barks, and Dean walks over and picks up his bundle of clothes. "So, meet you here or back at the room?"

Sam would rather not have animal control called on him as walks back to the motel. His dog form is a Malamute, and Malamutes aren't exactly delicate little dogs; the locals might think he's the thing that's been snacking on hikers. He woofs.

"Alright, here it is. I'm going to go talk to the girl. Good luck, Balto."

Balto saved hundreds of children's lives, Sam considers telling Dean the next time he finds himself with sufficiently advanced vocal cords. But he's not sure if Dean meant it as an insult or some sort of mini pep talk, so he lets it go.

Sam trots through the woods, snuffling through the undergrowth. He tries to filter out the normal woodsy scents—trees, squirrels, a tantalizing whiff of deer, the putrid muck of stagnant water—and focus on the their-kind-of-thing. He's glad that the locals are too freaked out to set foot in the woods, because the gray and bright white of his fluffy coat provides everything but camouflage.

The stench of human blood crashes over Sam, and he follows it to an otherwise non-descript stretch of woods. Some deputy had bravely tried to mark off the scene with bright yellow crime scene tape stretched out between a few trees (or at least, Sam knows it must be bright yellow—with the limited cones of his dog's eyes, it appears a washed out beigey brown).

The blood smell is still relatively fresh, a few days old at the most, so this must be the place where the latest guy was killed. Sam pads right into the thick of the odor and goes to work.

Sam has trained himself to identify everything from the ozone tang of spirits to the rotting stink of vampires, but no familiar supernatural scent jumps out at him. Interesting. Sam lifts his nose to the wind, sniffing. There's something distinctly feline hanging in the air—could it really have been a mountain lion?

Sam breathes deeper. He's scented cougar before, but no, this isn't cougar. There's something foreign under the smell, something darker.

Sam is so caught up trying to untangle the mystery aroma that he hears the intruder before he smells it. A branch snaps! some ten or fifteen yards to his left and Sam freezes. He sniffs again and catches human on the air.

He dashes away as silently as possible and crouches in a nearby hollow, hoping that the human didn't see him, or assumed that he was just a native forest-dweller. He slowly counts to ten and then peers over the edge of the hollow.

Humans all look like grayish blobs when he's a dog, so he takes in the few, generic details that he can make out—the strong build, the hair shaved close to the man's skull—and then does his best to memorize the man's scent for later positive identification. The guy kind of smells like…Dean. Like leather and sweat and gunpowder.

The guy's squatting in the loose circle of crime scene tape, poking through the fallen leaves. So, he's a hunter. It's not too surprising—a flattened human skull isn't the kind of subtle tip-off only the most seasoned of hunters pick up on. But Dean (and Dad before him) insists on them never working with another hunter unless Bobby has personally vouched for them, and it's a good rule. You never know who might have a problem with the whole skin-walker thing. They've had…unpleasant experiences before, and Dean doesn't like to take chances.

Sam decides to pack it in for the day. He hasn't learned much—just that it's not something they've hunted before and it might be feline in nature, but that's not nothing and he can't exactly continue his sleuthing with Unidentified Hunter roaming around. Maybe Dean has gotten something useful out of the girl.

He pads back to the rendezvous point and waits for Dean. Now he sees the wisdom of Dean's suggestion of meeting back at the room—now his only option is to wait for Dean as a Malamute or as a butt naked human. He settles down in a patch of warm sunlight and watches the yellowy leaves on the gray trees blow in the breeze.

He's drifted off into a nice nap by the time the Impala rumbles up, and Dean unceremoniously dumps his clothes and shoes on top of him. Sam leaps to his feet and snarls.

"Take it easy, Cujo." Dean turns away as Sam changes back and scrambles into his clothes. "Well, the girl says it was a mountain lion."

"Seriously?" The witnesses rarely have sane-sounding stories in his experience.

Dean raises his hand. "Let me finish. The girl says it was a mountain lion with a giant wrecking ball on its tail."

Sam blinks. Okay, now they're back on track to weird.

"Yeah. Even for us, right? Did you sniff anything out?"

"Nothing familiar. Something sort of like a mountain lion. And—" Sam hesitates. If he tells Dean about the hunter, his brother might demand that they take off right away, and Sam kind of wants to see this one through. They don't encounter brand new monsters very often.

"What?"

Sam sighs. No way Dean's going to let this go now. "There was a guy in the woods, checking out the crime scene. A hunter, I think."

Dean's face hardens immediately. "He see you?"

"No. I mean, I don't think so. And even if he did, all he saw was a dog, Dean. We can finish this hunt."

Dean still looks uneasy, so Sam turns the (ha) puppy-dog eyes on him. "Fine," he capitulates. "But we hear one word in town about someone who saw a husky loose in the words, we bail. Deal?"

"Deal. And for the last time, Dean, I'm a Malamute. Not a husky."

"Whatever." A half-smile tugs on the corner of Dean's mouth as he climbs into the Impala and Sam knows it will definitely not be the last time. Dean revs the engine to life. "Where to?"

"The library. I need to do some research."

"Whatever you say, Genevieve."

That one actually requires Sam to put in some thought. Soon, though, he remembers the lovable chocolate-brown cartoon dog. "Dude, you just admitted you watched Madeline."

"No, Sammy, you watched Madeline. I watched you."

While Sam hits the books, Dean falls asleep in a chair at the library, snoring loud enough to earn him dirty looks from the librarian. Sam wakes him up with a book thrown at his chest.

"It's a ball-tailed cat," he says, and Dean blinks him.

"You made that up."

"Nope." Sam sits next to Dean and plucks the book from his brother's chest, opening it to the page he'd bookmarked. A black-and-white drawing of a cougar-like creature with a thick, bulbous, barbed lump at the end of tail glares out at them. "See? They're indigenous to North American forests. They use the ball to smash their prey flat before they eat it."

"Shit," Dean says, rubbing a hand over his eyes. "Ball-tailed cat."

"Yeah."

"Well alright then. We got any idea how to kill this thing?"

"Flint to the heart."

Dean makes a face. "Flint?"

"Yeah. Looks like we're going bow-hunting."

"With home-made arrows." Dean stands up, stretching. "What, the friggin'… ball-tailed cat's too good for iron or silver?" Dean looks understandably pissed off at the prospect of spending the afternoon knapping their own blades and arrowheads, because flint's not exactly the kind of versatile weapon they keep in the trunk, but Sam's kind of glad the weapon doesn't have to be silver. He knows Dean doesn't mind, but Sam hates having to wrap up the silver weapons so he can touch them. "So, where does this thing lair up?"

"Uh, caves, maybe? Or really big trees?"

"Awesome. How specific."

"What do you want me to say? The lore's pretty scanty. But I got its scent, so we'll be able to track it down."

They drive around the perimeter of the town until they find a particularly rocky looking patch of woods. Dean mumbles about dumbass ball cats the whole time they're picking around for suitable chunks of stone.

"Looking for some flint?"

Sam flinches at the sudden voice. Dean straightens. There's a man standing at the edge of the road, and Sam knows without a single sniff that it's the hunter from the woods. He throws a pointed glance sideways and then Dean knows it too.

"Yeah," Dean says, and to the casual observer he's oozing relaxed confidence, but Sam can see the tension in his muscles, in the lines around his mouth. "How'd you know?"

"Name's Gordon Walker, and it looks to me like we're hunting the same thing." Gordon smiles. "Thought someone was trying to pull one over on me when I ended up on 'ball-tailed cat.'"

"Yeah, no kidding." Dean's shoulders relax a little. "I'm Dean, and this is my brother Sam."

Sam tries for a smile, but the hair on the back of his neck is standing on end and a growl is building in his chest. He just wants to get out of here.

Gordon steps up onto the rocks with them. "You know, I've got some extra flint knives, if you two get tired of banging stones together."

Dean glances at Sam before he opens his mouth, and Sam knows his brother has picked up on his uneasiness, knows Dean's going to say no.

And then the shit hits the fan.

Gordon locks eyes with Sam and pulls something small and brown out of his coat and squeezes it and then Dean lunges forward and Sam feels himself shrink, sees the colors fade from his vision, and no, this can't be happening, he hadn't tried to turn—

Sam hits the ground as a dog and everything goes black.

When Dean comes to, his first thought is how the fuck did he let that douchey fucker get the drop on him? His head pounds like a motherfucker and there's something warm running down the side of his face and he figures he must have hit his head on some goddamn flint when Gordon slugged him and he fell. He tries to stand, but something tugs at his wrist and holy shit, is he fucking handcuffed to a fucking car?

He blinks the shifting darkness out of his eyes and takes stock of the situation. He's handcuffed to the bumper of a car—and not even a nice car, a bright red piece of shit car—and sitting on the service road he and Sam drove in on and where the fuck is Sam?

Sam is lying on the road, too, far out of his reach, a big white and gray dog drawing in shallow breaths.

"You know, I'm almost disappointed."

Dean's gaze snaps up to see Gordon, the dead man walking, carrying a duffel bag. He drops it next to Sam, and Sam glares up at him. Dean wonders if Sam is conscious why the fuck isn't he tearing Gordon to pieces, and then he sees muzzle, the choke collar around Sam's throat, the length of rope tethering him to the same car as Dean, and fury courses through him.

"I expected this to be a lot harder."

Dean so isn't up for the fucking bad-guy monologue. "How'd you get Sam to turn?"

Gordon pulls out a little brown burlap bag and waves it at him. Hex bag. "Spell. Forces the skin-walker it's directed at to turn into their animal shape."

Awesome. Dean doesn't know what he hates more, the fact that this psycho forced Sam to turn, or that he apparently then stripped his brother's clothes off, or that he nabbed both of them and dragged them out onto the fucking road and tied them up. Come to think of it, Dean has a fucking lot of things to hate Gordon for.

"I've heard a lot of stuff about the Winchester boys over the years, you know, strange stuff." He pulls a length of chain—silver chain—from his bag, and Dean wants to punch him in his fucking face over and over again like he's never wanted anything else. "I never put much stock in it, thought it was just the usual hunter rumor mill. But I had a light week and thought, why not look into it?" He wraps the chains around Sammy's body, and Sam whines and his flesh smokes. Dean's vision goes red. "And I'm on not your tail for twelve hours when I see this one—" he kicks Sam's side and Dean snarls—"show his true colors."

"Dammit, Gordon!" Dean pulls at the handcuff until the metal slices deep into his flesh, blood dripping down to the asphalt, and he can't even feel it, not with more adrenaline than oxygen pumping through his veins, not while Sam is bound in silver chains and whimpering. "He's never hurt anyone who didn't have it coming. He's a hunter!"

Gordon looks at him with uncaring eyes. "He's a monster, Dean. And I'm sorry, but that's never gonna change."

"Gordon, listen to me!"

But Gordon's not listening to him. Gordon's picking up a silver knife and he's kneeling down next to Sammy's shaking form. "You should be thanking me, Dean. You too, Sammy." Dean's incredibly proud that Sam has enough left in him to growl at that. "I'm stopping you before you can do any damage." Gordon turns back to where Dean's trying to tear his own hand off. "You'll see this is for the best, Dean," he says. And then he raises the knife.

"SAM!"

Dean's shout twists into a howl as he turns. His skin ripples into short brown and white fur, and his teeth grow into fangs. His paw slips easily from the handcuff and he leaps out of his shoes and throws himself at Gordon's jugular.

He's just in time and he's too fucking slow. The knife slices through the flesh of Sammy's flank before Dean's flying body crashes into Gordon and knocks it away. He has just enough time to relish in the shocked and horrified look in Gordon's eyes before he sinks his teeth into Gordon's throat and tears.

As soon as the bastard's dead, Dean changes back as quickly as he can. Waves of pain crash through him at the too fast transition, and no doubt he's going to have a migraine later from the rapid shifts in his senses, but can't bring himself to give a single fuck about that when Sam's in trouble. Dean's clothes are twisted hopelessly around him and he manages to get his arms through his sleeves and his pants on straight before he collapses at Sam's side. He spits out a gob of blood and muscle.

"It's okay, Sammy." The stab wound is his first priority. Dean grabs his jacket and presses it against the messy, gaping cut in Sam's side, trying to staunch the blood flow. "Not that bad," he murmurs as Sam lets out a long, high whine. "Not that bad, little brother."

Next Dean finds a knife in Gordon's bag and cuts off the collar and muzzle, and then unwraps the chains as gently as he can, keeping up a running litany of "Hey, hey, hey, I've got you, buddy, everything's fine," hating Gordon and himself and the world every time he uncovers a bleeding welt and Sam whimpers. The fucker used spiked chains. Dean wishes he could tear his throat out all over again.

Once he's finished with battlefield triage, Dean is painfully aware that this isn't a motel room fix. Sam needs a hospital.

"Sammy." He rubs his free hand over Sam's ears like he knows the freaking girl likes as his other hand presses over the worst wound. "Think you can change back, buddy?" It would be better if he could take Sam to a human hospital.

Sam's eyes screw shut and his body shudders, and Dean can tell he's trying as hard as he can, but it stays a dog's body. That can happen, Dean knows from (god awful) experience—if you're hurt bad enough, you can't change. Sammy's going to be stuck this way until he gets better.

Unless he doesn't get better—then Dean will be salt-and-burning a dog.

No. Fuck no. Dean banishes that thought from his mind. Sammy's gonna be fine. "It's okay, Sammy. No problem. Hey, you'll be easier to carry this way."

He lifts Sam as gently as possible, but he can't help jarring him and Sam whines. He settles Sam in the back of the Impala, for once not caring about the dog fur and the blood, and then guns it to the animal hospital he noticed on the way into town. He's been behind the wheel for nearly five minutes before he catches a glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror and realizes his face is slathered with blood. He wipes it off and presses the accelerator.

Dean is too panicked and shaky from adrenaline to come up with a better cover story than "my dog was kidnapped as an animal sacrifice by Satanists," but with his honestly terrified face and all the crap that's happened in this town lately, the vets swallow it and no one calls the cops as he paces the waiting room. It's hours before he gets any definitive news, and when he calls Bobby to finish up the hunt and take care of Gordon's body, it kills him that he can't give an answer to the old man's question of how Sam is doing.

Eventually, a veterinary surgeon emerges from the operating room and Dean descends on him. They are, Dean learns with a relief that makes him weak at the knees, fairly certain Sam will survive.

"But even if he does pull through," the man says carefully. "Your dog will have a long, painful recovery ahead of him. He likely won't be up to running speed for months. It might be kinder to—"

Rage surges through Dean as he realizes what the guy is suggesting. "To what? To kill him?"

The man blanches. "Sir, I'm just saying, it's a very low quality of life for—"

"Then why don't you go back in that room and make it better instead of asking me to kill my br—" Dean stops himself in mid-sentence. "My best friend."

The man nods hurriedly and skitters back into the O.R., leaving Dean to sink into the nearest chair and bury his face in his hands. Why the fuck couldn't he have let Sammy interview the girl for once? Then it would be him Gordon saw change, not Sam, and him in that O.R.

It's another few hours before a female vet—clearly he's scared off the man—comes out and tells him that Sammy's all patched up and looking good. She leads him into a recovery room where Sam—swaddled up in so many bandages he looks like one of those Egyptian dog-mummies—is resting. Not wanting to disturb his brother's injuries, Dean scrubs his knuckles over Sam's muzzle. "Hey, Sam."

Sammy's tongue laps out, the rough surface running over Dean's fingers. "Gross, dude," he murmurs, but he doesn't really mind. Rules for acceptable dog affection are different than rules for acceptable people affection, although that doesn't mean he won't be giving Sam shit for this when the kid is up to it.

Sam's eyes slip shut, and soon he's snoring gently. The vet approaches, checking Sam's bandages, taking his pulse.

"So, how much longer 'til I can spring Sammy from this place?"

"Well," she says cheerfully. "He's healing up nicely. Much better than any of us expected." Dean's jaw tightens as he remembers exactly how much the vets didn't think Sam was gonna heal up nicely. "I think you can take him home tomorrow, if you're ready to bring him back every few days for check-ups."

Dean nods. He has no intention of doing it, of course, but if Sam's good enough to go home then he'll be good enough to change back and Dean can handle the check-ups himself, as long as Sam's human. Although he is a little worried about how the stitches will transfer to Sam's human form.

"I can tell you love him a lot." The vet—Cindy, her name tag says—is still standing there, one hand petting Sam's head. "How long have you had him?"

"Uh…pretty much my whole life?"

Cindy smiles. "It can feel like that with your dog, can't it?"

Dean returns her smile. Sister, you have no idea.

Dean drives for as long as he thinks Sam can handle and then gets them set up in a nicer-than-usual, mystery-stain-free motel room, and soon Sam is able to change back into his gigantic human form. The stitches grow with him, thank fuck, although that does leave Dean to wonder why stitches are apparently cool when clothes are such a fucking headache. Not that he'd ever admit it to Sam, but even he finds having to go stark naked every time he wants to turn to be damn inconvenient.

Within a few hours Sam is clothed and fed and drugged to the gills and Dean can finally relax. Except he can't. This had been way, way too fucking close a call, and he doesn't know if Gordon had tipped off any other hunters about Sam before the son of a bitch had met his grisly and oh-so-deserved end.

Sam sleeps for a full day, lazy ass that he is. Dean makes two more calls to Bobby and spends the rest of his time lying on his bed, thinking. When Sam finally shows signs of intelligent life, Dean is by his side in an instant with a bottle of water, watching as the confusion in Sam's eyes turns to realization. Welcome to your life, kiddo.

Sam groans. "Dean…"

"Easy there, Shiloh." Dean rests a hand on Sam's shoulder, partly to comfort, partly to hold him in place so he doesn't move and fuck up his wounds.

"You know, White Fang, sooner or later you're gonna run out of those."

Yeah, Sam's okay. Dean smiles. "Hey, I haven't yet."

They're quiet for a few moments, until Sam blinks blearily up at him. "How long have I been out of it?"

"It's been almost a week since we got grabbed."

"And Gordon?" Sam shifts uneasily. "Or…what's left of him?"

Sam isn't meeting his eyes. Sam is guilty over the death of that psychopathic fucker, because of course he is. He's Sam. He cried for days when he got overexcited in dog form and nipped a squirrel's tail. "Bobby's gonna salt and burn him. He had it coming, Sammy. I mean, what was I supposed to do? Give him a warning bark and let him run off and raise an army of douchenozzles to come after us?"

"No, I know. You had to." Sam takes the water, flinching as he tries to move into a position where he can drink it without taking an involuntary bath. "It's just gonna be tricky explaining the hunter who disappeared while working the same case as us, you know?"

"Bobby'll cover for us."

"All Bobby does is cover for us," Sam mutters, putting the water bottle on his nightstand. "We'd be murdered about twenty times over if Bobby wasn't covering for us."

It's true. Bobby's kept their secret from the hunter community for as long as they've had it, providing nothing but support, never thinking any different of them for all their fur and claws, and enabling their addition to rawhide.

"He's Bobby, Sam. He wants to do it."

"I know," Sam says again. "But sometimes I think it's not fair to him, you know? He used to have a lot more contacts that he has now. A lot more friends."

Dean wonders how much of that is their fault and how much of that is typical hunter turnover, but he can't argue with Sam about this, because he kind of agrees. Bobby's had to cut ties with every hunter who's come too close to the truth in order to keep his house as a safe home base for the two of them. And with yet another near-miss, Dean's been wondering exactly how long they can sustain this, how much longer they can keep crisscrossing the lower 48 and hunting the supernatural while, you know, being supernatural.

"Maybe we should just go to Alaska," Dean jokes. And then he thinks, why was that a joke? "We should go to Alaska."

"Are you serious?" Sam sits up further, wincing a little. "You really want to drive to Alaska?"

"Yeah. Just until the buzz around Gordon's death dies down." The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks it's a good idea. "Why not? Lots of backwoods hunts, lax leash laws, fewer people around to ID us as skin-walkers." Actually, it sounds like a damn great idea. "Maybe you can even join a sled dog team with some of the other huskies."

"You know, Dean, it's been eighteen years, and I'm still a Malamute."

"Yeah." Dean thinks back to when this started, a hunt gone epically wrong when they were just little kids. It had seemed like the end of the world at the time, but they've handled it pretty damn well, if he says so himself. "You were such a cute puppy. I wonder what went wrong."

Sam rolls his eyes. "Yeah, I was a cute puppy. And you had fleas." Low blow, Sammy.

"Wait." Dean hops off his bed and digs around in his bag. "You wanna know what the vet gave me?" Dean pulls out the container, popping the lid and waving it under Sam's nose. "Liver treats. Your favorite!"

Sam scowls. "Fuck off, Dean."

"Ah, c'mon. Hey, who's a good boy? Who's a good boy? You're a good—"

Turns out Sam's not too weak to whip his water bottle at Dean's face.