Introduction to The Mark

Author: Wakingsparrow

Story Info: Set sometime after Sam is no longer soulless. It's probably going to be more AU in that I'll be ignoring events that played out in the show...like the entirety of season 7 as well as the 'mother of all' arch. Some things may not line up, so please bare with me. I'm going to try to keep this more a classic 'saving people, hunting things'.

Feedback is loved...NAY, venerated! It's my first story! Woot!


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Deep breath…steady… focus…exhale.

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Any other day he wouldn't have needed to reiterate the phrase in his head, one he had heard from age 12. It was one his subconscious had gotten so used to integrating into his movements every time shit hit the fan. One person's death, maybe a few…saved. It wouldn't even have to be the present life. Maybe it would be someone's red existence soaking into the ground a year from now. It all came down to this.

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Deep breath…steady…focus…exhale.

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Dean's hands quivered slightly, the dot between two crests disappearing out of sight for just a moment. He shouldn't even be thinking about it, it should be that run of the mill. Life shouldn't be so royally screwed right now. Apocalypse diverted, that was supposed to be it. I should be in hell. The world's not over yet, it still keeps kicking somehow. Dean mulled these thoughts unspoken, not that anyone would be around to hear him aside the stacked skeletons of cars slowly being engulfed in summer-tanned weeds. "Damn it" The man spat to the side and shifted his feet in the dust, squared his shoulders and collected a gulp of air for the second time. He slightly lifted his arms back up. Yet another bead of sweat soaked into the back of his tee shirt as he narrowed his eyes. The peripheral world around him blurred and the crests again cradled the dot.

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Steady…focus…

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Suddenly with a squeeze the cool metal he grasped kicked to life, furiously bucking out a shell of the cargo it had held but a blink of an eye before. It cackled out a shout of energy that echoed the broken silence into the hulls of the beached vehicles around him. An earthy scent of gun power clung to his fingers before the hot and scarce breeze could wick it away.

Dean could have sworn the amber bottle that teetered on the hood of a practically prehistoric truck some distance away inanimately mocked him, unscathed. You drank the life out of me. It seemed to gnash out wordlessly, I'm not going down that easy. The angry sound dulled away slowly as the arrogant container settled again only millimeters from its previous resting place.

He knew it was all in his head, but what the target haunted him with was something he would have said only a few months ago. Honestly lately, it sounded like something he would say now. How could things possibly be about as messed up as they were before? How could this tangled disaster of shit they had tried to set straight come back to bite…Dean cut himself short before he played all of it over in his mind for the millionth time.

This. This was supposed to stop the thinking. This was supposed be enjoyable and come to him as naturally as twisting off the cap of what he was aiming at. His hand ran through his damp hair as he stretched his shoulder blades and whipped his head up with a frustrated grunt. It had been an unforgivingly hot summer. Crops were suffering, wildfires sprang up in the midst of droughts eating homes and jobs and people. It wasn't something you could shoot or salt and burn. Terrible innocent death was natural, as hard as it was for a hunter to stand back and watch. Was it something they had started? Was there something causing it he could have ended…could still end if he could just figure of the signs?

He clutched a beer from a small cooler behind him and took a long swallow. It would matter if he could stop it, it was probably just cause a tsunami to knock off California or something. If there was one thing Dean was sure of, it was that his actions hurt people one way or another. It had been proven a hundred times over.

How could he compete with the long road of the deceased and heartbroken that stretched as far behind him as a straight Kansas road? Maybe the odds of him setting things right verses regular people being hurt weighed out. Maybe it didn't. Things had gotten a little harder to call these last few months, if little means a shitload. Grey areas were for people who didn't know the difference between right and wrong, especially in his line of work. Maybe there was no hard chromatic gradation in this anymore.

The eldest Winchester sighed heavily and shook past situations from his mind as he plunged the beer back into the nearly melted ice. Target practice was clearly not helping with the whole 'not thinking' bit. Nevertheless, he gathered himself back into position with his arms extended, elbows slightly bend, directing the gun to aim at the bottle. Do what you're good at. The left hand gradually encircled the right with thumbs crossing, bracing for the kick back. Stop thinking about it so much. He blinked against the sizzling warmth and concentrated on the weighted barrel's aim ahead.

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Deep breath…steady…focus…exhale.

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The weapon startled again sending out a thunder-like crack over the car lot. The casing landed with a harmless tink a foot away accompanied with a zing of bullet against metal.

That bastard bottle didn't even bother to wobble this time.

"Fuck." Dean barked the word out while kicking up dirt almost as vehemently as the semi-automatic this time, not caring if the labyrinth of cars spoke it back to him in a resounding and evaporating 'fuhck-fuhh-kkk-fhhh-kkkkk-c-c-k-kk'

Okay, yeah. The world wasn't ending, but that didn't mean it wasn't still going to the dogs. What ever reprieve Dean thought he would get after popping the lock to the pit and throwing the bad guys embodied as his brothers in, it sure as hell (deprecatingly full of puns) wasn't this. The image of losing the person he was closest in the world to would always be the waking horror of his dreams for the rest of his life. But Sammy was out. All in one piece at this point. After everything. All there. Right? How the hell would he know, they hadn't spoken in weeks.

Don't want to go there. Dean clenched his fist. No Point. He had made the judgment to keep the hunters life after knowing he could never go to something he never had. After a few weeks of living out of the Impala and slamming back a fifth in silence inside shoddy motels, he'd ended up at Bobby's. He was someone who had been there, who understood the effort and the loss it took to do what the job demanded. What the job demanded.His entire family…the Winchester line all but blown away just like that. Hunters had no life, only a job without a paycheck to do it.

The August sun was leisurely starting to dip into the west. Cicadas began their funeral whirr, droning over Dean's internal musings as the light became less and less direct. It hadn't really crossed his mind that he'd been in the back part of the property all afternoon. The smell of warmth hinted with sweet turning wheat, a case of beer, and a box or two of recently fired ammunition had been enough to keep him occupied for most of the day.

"Not going down that easy, huh?" Dean straightened up and huffed, ticking down the safety he'd routinely put into place on the side of the gun. The inevitable dying light glinted off the bottle's neck and onto the rusting finish of the vehicle. "Everyone meets their match." He gritted out what he said with the sea of cars as witness, his tone sneering into the words.

The sky had turned into more of a rutilant haze just before it dipped into the flat Dakota woods along the horizon. A crack and the explosion of glass reverberated out sending a white tailed deer bolting up from its hidden foraging a field over. Any other day he wouldn't have had to repeat the phrase at all before meeting the mark.