Fusion of the X-Men universe and the SPN universe. No X-Men characters appear or are mentioned in this fic.

Warnings for suicidal thoughts.

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Rediscovery

Baby knew who Dean really was first.

She first spoke when her human petted her chromed bumper and marveled at her lines. She first thought when he first grasped her steering wheel. Every time her human folded himself into her leather seat, she softened the cushion underneath him. She knew that he appreciated her efforts, even if it sometimes confused him. After all, she knew that no other car treated him this well. But then again, no other car had him imbued into its very undercarriage, his sweat and blood and tears soaked into leather and vinyl.

Baby loved her human, even when he tried not to acknowledge that he could hear her. She knew that the older human, the one who felt like her human but not, meaner and colder, would not take her human's abilities well. She often heard the older human, who her human called Dad or sir depending on how much he sank into her seats and how much he wobbled in place, complaining about "muties." Her human gripped the wheel or the door handle that much harder whenever that word came up. It made her want to slam on the brakes and swerve so hard that the older human tumbled out of the car. Her human shouldn't be scared.

When her human was alone, he would serenade her with the tapes that he stuck in her player. He would chatter to her about repairs that he could do – skid plates and better brakes and a cleaner carburetor. When he got to talking about repairs, she always told him about the little problems she could feel – a wire leading to her left headlight shaking loose, her right taillight flickering due to a bad bulb, a tick in her engine. He would assure her that he would fix everything as soon as he stopped, and he did. He spoiled her.

When the younger human sprawled across the backseat, Baby tried to cushion his head. She knew that this boy was special to her human; she could hear it in his voice when he woke the younger human from his sleep. When the older human wasn't seated in the front seat anymore, the younger one sprawled there and Baby tried to give him more foot room. Her human always smiled when the boy exclaimed about how there was more room than it seemed.

Baby knew that most cars didn't have what she had. She hesitated to call it a "spirit," as her human had suggested with a deep sadness coloring his thoughts. She imagined that it was more of a consciousness nurtured by her human. She could feel the energy running from his hands and feet into her chassis, giving her some semblance of emotion and will. She could feel his will giving her engine second wind when they were caught too far from a service station, keeping her wheels rolling when they should have stuttered to a stop.

She knew her human was special. She also knew that, because he gave her what no other car had, she would protect him and cherish him until her engine locked up and her chassis rusted through.

Bobby realized who Dean was next.

One day while he strolled around the salvage yard, he happened upon Dean standing in front of the Impala holding a jug of motor oil and a wrench. He didn't know why the boy was waiting; if the car needed more oil, why didn't he just put it in?

When Dean started talking, it only served to compound his confusion. After all, why would the kid be asking the car if it needed more oil? That was like asking a house if it needed roof repairs. But once the question was out, Dean waited for a few seconds, nodded, and asked, "So, if you don't think you need oil, d'you want me to fix that loose bolt?"

He almost seemed to be listening to a lengthy and in-depth response, if the way his head was nodding and his face went all pensive had anything to say about it. But that was…preposterous! Cars didn't talk. Bobby would know that. He did live near the wrecks of nigh on two hundred of them, after all.

But damn it all if Dean didn't laugh as some unheard joke and wiggle under the Impala. Bobby walked away then, leaving the kid to his repairs, a lot more on his mind than before. When he got back to his house and found the paper with the headline "Mutants More Common Than Expected, Scientists Admit" screaming across the cover, it hit him.

Well, why shouldn't the boy get this break? The rest of his life was shitty – no mother, an absentee father, and a little brother who was currently in his fourth high school in as many months. No home except for the car that he seemed to know so well. Dean needed a friend, no matter how aloof he tried to hold himself, and the hunting life didn't offer many choices. He deserved someone to talk to that wouldn't either tell him to man up and watch out for his little brother or resent him on principle for following the other's orders. If it was a car, who cares? Bobby wouldn't give a shit if it was a scabby, mangy old mutt with enough fleas to cover a man from head to foot.

He loved the kid, mutant or not.

John didn't take the realization anywhere near as well.

He stumbled into the dingy motel room drunk after another night at the bar, wallowing in his misery and how stupid he was to let Sam go (and how furious he was that the kid tried). It took him a couple of seconds to realize that Dean wasn't in the second bed. Trying to figure out where the twenty-two year old could have gone, John tottered around the partition between the beds and the kitchenette. He found Dean staring glumly (and why did he look so damn guilty) at the percolating coffee machine on the counter.

John grunted to himself and made to collapse onto the first bed and pass out for a while. Then a memory of earlier that morning surfaced from the haze of booze: him trying (and failing, multiple times) to make that same machine crank out a cuppa to alleviate the migraine that always accompanied too much booze and too little sleep.

He didn't think rationally after that. His son couldn't be one of them – he'd raised him right, brought him up as well as a man could when he had a job to do. He hadn't even really told the boys about the muties.

That didn't mean they weren't freaks. If John had ever come upon a mutant during a job, he would've shot the bastard and put it out of its goddamn misery. Now his son was one of those freaks, and John didn't know what to do. So he acted.

He levered himself upright, stomping into the kitchenette and gripping the mutant's arm. He screamed incomprehensible words into the freak's face, words like "mutie" and "bastard" and "no son of mine" and with every word he could see the mutant's face fall. (He ignored the slight twinge that accompanied every flinch and made damn sure that the mutant wasn't packing heat.) He hurled the monster at the car that it'd probably corrupted with its powers; he'd never touch that pile of scrap again. (He forgot all about the young blonde woman who used to sit next to him and remembered instead the old truck he'd seen for sale on the way into town.) John spat in the direction of the mutant freak and ignored the tear tracks on its face and took one last look at the car that'd carried him so far, so far, but it'd been corrupted and he wouldn't take it back. The man – not a father no more, one son that left him, another that couldn't be his – stumbled back into the now-empty motel room and scowled at the cup of coffee on the counter. The shattering of glass and the splashing of spilt coffee accompanied the rush of blood as he passed out on the floor.

A mutant was no son of his.

Baby held him through the hard times.

She knew as soon as the older human stormed out to where she sat that something was very wrong. When her human's back hit her door, she very nearly ran over the human who dared to hurt him. But she didn't, because she could hear the slurs in his voice, the anger in his tone, and knew that her human would be climbing into her soon. She could get her human far away from here, and with the way the older human was acting, there was a fair chance that she wouldn't have to take him back.

When her human finally dropped onto her leather seats, Baby almost honked in distress. She could feel the salty tears smeared all over the hands that gripped her steering wheel, and his whole body shook like a loose bolt. She tried her best to funnel all of the happiness that he'd ever shown to her back across to him, but her human's brilliant mind only sank deeper into what felt disturbingly like self-hatred.

Now, Baby had talked her human down more than once when he sank into despair about the younger human with the too-long legs or the sweet human that never came back after the fire. But this pit of hatred felt deeper than anything she'd ever tried to fight against before. It almost overwhelmed her before she could pull herself back.

She extricated herself from her human's pain and skimmed the surface, trying to figure out why his hands still shook and they still smeared salt on her steering wheel. She caught an image of the bridge that she crossed over on the way into town, coupled with a yawning emptiness that made her want to fall apart at the seams and cease to exist. Her human drove on, apparently numb to her probing.

Well that was more than enough of that mess. Baby took control in a way that she never had before, slowing down and crunching onto the gravel shoulder of the two-lane highway. She brought herself to a stop and locked all of the doors, ignoring her human's increasingly frantic pumping of the gas pedal.

After she was sure that her human couldn't get away from her and try to do something altogether too rash, she concentrated and inundated his mind with images of the gangly human that he'd shown her, stupid candid memories like the time the younger one had been just a kid and they'd heckled the older human for hours before breaking down in giggles. Her human tried to shove her away, but she held fast, as stubborn as the steel she'd been made from, and shoved more nostalgic memories of happy days on the road. Memories of days when the car wasn't filled with loud music to negate the silence that stretched for miles. Memories of days when "college" didn't exist and high school was a strange, alien place for grown-ups. Memories of when she could practically feel the content radiating off of her human, of long, empty roads and good food and good company.

Her human crumpled under the onslaught, and salty liquid seeped into the cracks of her steering wheel as his head came to rest upon it. Baby cradled him like she used to when he was much younger, holding him like the woman in her human's happiest yet bitterest memories. She felt one such memory now, of the woman whispering "Angels are watching over you," and she also felt the hurt and anger from her human as the memory faded. She heard him grind out, "Then why am I so fucked up, Mom? Why couldn't they make me right?"

Baby held him through the night as he shuddered in her seats, and she let the turbulence of passing trucks rock him into unconsciousness.

She knew that her human would eventually turn to the gangly human for comfort. She could feel in his dreams the need for a companion, a hunting partner.

She also knew that every memory of the other human was tingled with betrayal.

Her human might forgive the other for leaving him alone with the older human, but she most certainly would not.

Not until the last pound of steel from her frame was melted down for scrap.

Sam took the revelation much better.

When a noise from somewhere in the apartment he shared with Jess roused him, he levered himself out of the bed. He slunk around corners until he found a shadow staring at the radio on the windowsill. He thought the silhouette looked familiar, but sprung anyway. After a short tussle, seeing his big brother's face for the first time in four years came as more of a shock than a run-of-the-mill burglar could have.

Sam backed off, turning to find Jess eyeing the two of them with suspicion. She asked if he knew the guy on the floor, and Sam nodded that yes, this was his brother, Dean. Dean stood and looked her up and down, his standard leer pasted on his face. He dropped it when Sam gave him the evil eye with a silent promise of painful retribution if he touched his girlfriend.

Dean asked him if they could talk, alone, and Sam initially refused, because hell, Jess was going to be a part of this twisted family as soon as he could get up the nerve to pull out the ring he'd hidden in his underwear drawer. But Dean insisted and Sam looked closer, saw the way his big brother's shoulder slumped, saw the dark shadows under his eyes, even caught a glimpse of the desperation haunting his stance.

He asked Jess to please, give him and his brother a few minutes, they have some important family business to speak about.

Once Jess was gone, Sam watched his brother take a deep breath and let it out. He didn't say a thing – he knew it was Dean's turn to explain. And he did.

Sam listened with a sort of muted horror and wonderment – and wasn't that a strange mix – as his big brother admitted that he was a mutant and explained how John had literally tossed him on his ass when the old bastard found out. He stayed quiet as Dean shuddered his way through a description of what he could do, and didn't move a muscle as Dean about collapsed after explaining how his car – his car, for Pete's sake – saved him from himself.

He supposed silence might not have been the best choice when Dean almost made it out the door, eyes watery and defeated. He broke the oppressive silence with a single sentence: "Dean, I'm majoring in Mutant Rights Law." Sam watched his big brother turn, hope written all over his normally closed-off face, and wanted to hurt John for how he'd hurt Dean.

The brothers sat and just talked for a long time, it seemed. Sam talked about college and Jess and his studies, while Dean chuckled his way through stories of ridiculous hunts – who knew that teenybopper vampires even existed, let alone lived as undead vegetarians?

So it took Sam by surprise when Dean suddenly just blurted that John had disappeared about two weeks ago, according to the hunter's grapevine, and that made him worried. Sam argued and argued as only a law student could that Dean owed nothing to the man, that John had hurt him so this was really his just desserts. But Dean, after hearing every logical argument that his brother could throw at him, only said, "But he's our dad, Sammy." And Sam saw the loyalty that his brother somehow still harbored for the man that rejected him, that familial loyalty that was well and truly Dean, and knew that his brother would go chasing after every rumor to save John no matter what he'd suffered. And Sam agreed, because his brother already had a lead, so this shouldn't take more than a weekend, and Dean really had been alone long enough by now.

Sam kissed Jess goodbye and walked out the door with his big brother leading the way. When he saw the Impala, he noticed just how much she gleamed and how few empty bottles of Jack laid in the floorboard of the backseat. Dean always had cared for his car as an outlet for his anger and angst – Sam definitely preferred that to drinking like John.

He looked at Dean funny when he eyed the car and told it to "behave," because yeah, Dean liked to talk to his car, but it's not like it could talk back. Then he tried to open the passenger door and it just wouldn't pop free, and Dean gently tapped the Impala's side and muttered that Sammy's okay now, he's back. The door opened slowly with a protesting groan, and Dean sighed that he just oiled every single hinge on her two days ago, really.

Sam thought that maybe Dean wasn't so crazy after all, and once they were on the road he rubbed the Impala's door panel and whispered (feeling a bit silly) "I'm sorry for leaving him alone." Just like that, his seat just softened and that spring that had been poking him in the ass disappeared and he would swear that the amount of knee room spontaneously doubled. Sam tried hard to never slam Baby's door so hard the windows rattle again.

Baby appreciates his efforts, she does.

She can feel the happiness that her human exudes now that the gangly human is back, so she doesn't torture him as much as she could. Even so, the seat is never as soft as it could be, and the footwell never as spacious.

The gangly human hurt her human, and she could keep one hell of a grudge.

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Possibly a one-shot. I might come back later and explore how the SPN universe changes with this in mind.

Comments are love.