Disclaimer: I don't own anything supernatural.
Just something I hashed out when I was thinking about how Victor and Dean are similar and that Victor would make a pretty good hunter.
#
Dean plays fast and loose, all knife sharp grins and coiled strength.
Victor thinks he's a contrary fucker. More so now he knows the truth.
Dean cracks jokes at the most inappropriate of times and is only ever serious when everyone else is laughing.
Sometimes Victor sees a defence mechanism, sometimes he sees bitter humour. Mostly he sees an unrepentant asshole.
Victor doesn't think he's ever seen someone so resistant to any forms of authority and he was one sarcastic bastard as a kid, but Dean? Well, he seems to take a vicious sort of glee in completely wrecking everyone's expectations of him, doesn't matter if it's good or bad, just don't pretend to know the guy.
Victor sort of hates him. He assumes that's part of what makes them such good friends.
(After all, Dean seems to need some self imposed flagellation.)
#
"I thought you said burning the bones banished them!" Victor yells, skidding behind a grave stone and checking his gun. Three bullets packed with rock salt.
Fuck.
"Yeah, well there are always exceptions." The voice is tinny over the phone and from the sounds of it; Victor isn't the only one running for his life.
"Tell me how to get rid of the fucker!"
A slow molasses thick chuckle is audible before a flicker of movement has Victor dropping his phone and raising the shotgun. He shoots, feeling the gun kick back into his shoulder with a more solid thump than he is used to.
He still hasn't quite got the hang of using a shotgun in daily life.
(The handgun he used to use for work he rarely shot anywhere except the firing range.)
The ghost/spirit/echo thing vanishes with a curtailed scream.
Victor swipes back his phone and hears the end of what sounds like the explanation he asked for.
"What do I need to do?" Victor yells, hoping the bastard is holding the phone close enough to his ear to recoil at the volume.
"Salt and burn anything that remains of the ghost-" A muffled thump and a groan of pain interrupts. Victor is tired of this bullshit. He knows the ghost has already reformed by now and if probably on the war path.
He has two more bullets.
His canister of salt is still at the grave (the grave he just desecrated, the warped part of his brain cackles), left abandoned when the spirit attacked.
"What? Burn what? I already got the bones!"
"Is there anything you missed?"
"Like what?" Victor hisses, incensed.
"Did you get the right grave?" The bastard is bloody grinning, Victor can feel it.
"Of course I got-"
"Calm down, every hunter makes that mistake one time or another; you should have seen Sammy's face on his third hunt-"
"That's nice and all but can we save the reminiscing and painting each other's toenails for a time when I'm not being pelted by bits of tree from a goddam ghost kid?"
Victor ducks and cocks his gun but he can't see the ghost to take a shot.
"It'll be some affects or something that the ghost left behind, like a necklace or a doll or-"
"So, something personal." Victor concludes, ducking a rock aimed for his skull.
"Yeah, that about sums it-" a hoarse gasp interrupts and from the sounds of it Dean is too busy having his ass kicked to continue the conversation.
(For that matter, so is Victor.)
Victor hangs up and tucks away his phone, his mind racing with possibilities. What possession could this kid ghost have that was enough to anchor its soul to?
"Aw, fuck." Victor moans when it hits him. Literally and metaphorically.
Of fucking course.
He gathers himself up off the floor (and for such a small kid the ghost sure packs a punch) and makes a dash for the local museum.
He knew getting to know Dean Winchester would be a bad thing, from the moment he lay eyes on the photo of those sly green eyes and that irrepressible smirk.
He just didn't realise it would end up with him breaking into museums and destroying state property.
His phone rings just as he's hightailing it out of the town, he never used to have to worry about changing his cars number plates, and he fumbles for it, gripping the steering wheel between his knees for a moment.
"What?"
"Guess you survived then. Found the item?" Dean asks, sounding far too blithe for a man who was getting his ass kicked just under half an hour ago.
"Yeah, burnt that sucker. You?" He tucks the phone into the hollow of his shoulder so he can grab a candy bar he stashed earlier.
"Ghouls, man, nasty fuckers. Got a bit of life in them yet."
"Why haven't you torched them yet?" Victor asks around a mouthful of chocolate. His mother would despair if she saw him ignoring all the manners she tried to pound into him.
"Don't worry; we're on it, I have a plan."
"Why does that fill me with dread?" Victor asks dryly, opening a can of coke and drinking most of it down in one. It's lukewarm, nasty.
"Because you're a smart man." Dean's voice is raspy, Victor bets he was either strangled or punched in the throat earlier.
"Should I be worried?"
"What, for little old me? Why, Victor." Dean gushes, falsely bright and fluttery. Victor snorts.
"I meant for the poor towns people who are inflicted with your presence. And Sam, I mean the kid lives with you twenty-four/seven."
"I think you mean blessed with my presence, I'm never an infliction, why I-" A loud boom rocks through Victor's eardrums and it takes him more than a few seconds to realise the noise came through the phone and there wasn't a bomb going off on the road.
"Dean?" He waits; he can't hear anything through the phone. "Winchester?" He taps at his steering wheel.
"Answer me asshole!" He yells. He will deny to his dying days the relief that floods him when a cough meets his ears.
"What the hell happened?" Victor demands, the relief turning to anger.
"My plan was a little more explosive than I intended." Dean admits with something that would be sheepishness in other people but in Dean-fucking-Winchester is closer to smugness.
"Did you bomb a cemetery?" Victor asks warily, not sure if he wants an answer.
"Close but no cigar."
Victor waits in silence for Dean to explain.
"It was a warehouse."
"You blew up a warehouse and didn't even have the good sense to clear the area?" Victor asks, despairing for the lemming like mentality Dean shows at times.
"I didn't exactly know it was a freaking warehouse full of fireworks! The blast radius was further than expected."
Victor mulls this over.
"You," he begins, pushing down a small curl of a smile that threatens to appear, "are a public menace."
Dean chuckles.
#
It's by chance that Victor is even alive.
Luck, if he believed in such a thing.
He popped out of the station to grab some coffee – proper stuff, not the shit at the break room – was only gone ten minutes but by the time he made it back the place was an inferno, sirens on the horizon announcing their incoming.
It could just have easily been Nancy, except she was knee deep in forms, trying to think up something to write to explain why there were so many dead (and alive) bodies at the station, why there was a dead sheriff, why occult symbols were etched everywhere and why the place was swimming in salt and sulphur.
He's glad to be alive, but sometimes he wishes the young police man he never caught the name of or Nancy had escaped instead.
#
"Dean." Victor greets, still a little numb.
"Victor?" Dean asks through the phone with caution that he had lacked in all their encounters to date.
"Yeah." Victor breaths out on a sigh, as though still unsure of that fact himself. He watches absently as the fire fighters approach the blaze, trying to combat the flames with spittle and a prayer.
"Really? Cause man, watching the TV right now makes me really doubtful that Victor Henricksen made it out alive."
"I went out for coffee." Victor says, glancing down at the forgotten coffee, spilt where he dropped the container.
"Shit, man, look, come to the motel just out of town, it's called the, uh, 'dozy dog motel', ask for Rich Williams."
Victor hangs up and wonders if he should go there or report to his superiors. He stifles a crazy laugh, what would he say?
That demons attacked on mass?
That he worked with two known felons to fight them off with condiments and pretty pictures?
That he let Dean and Sam Winchester walk free without even trying to lock them back up?
He makes his way to the motel.
He knocks. Dean greets him by upending a flask of water over his face. Victor spits out the water onto Dean's boots.
"Holy water." Sam says somewhat sheepishly from inside the room.
"Christo." Dean says, watching his face avidly.
"Bless you." Victor glowers.
"Alright, alright, can't be too careful. Just one more test." Dean hands him a knife. Victor examines it; it looks like it's made of silver.
"What?" Victor asks, does Dean want him to prove his fruit carving skills or something?
"Cut yourself." Dean orders.
Victor blinks. He really should have gone to his superiors. He may have been shipped off to a mental asylum but it would spare him this Dean Winchester brand of crazy.
"The knife's silver, skinwalkers are allergic to silver." Sam pipes in helpfully.
"Skinwalkers?" Victor makes a shallow cut on his arm, the knife is sharper than he thought and the cut is deeper than intended, he hisses at the sting. "Anything else? You want me to do a handstand while singing the Canadian national anthem? Perhaps a couple of high kicks?"
"Nah, not unless you want to, show off that singing voice, that dexterity." Dean smirks.
"Not for you, you're not my type." Victor comes further into the room and sits down on one of the beds. He feels exhausted. Tired deep into his bones.
"Please, everyone's my type." Dean grins, not a smirk or a smug smile but a quicksilver thing, far more fleeting and true than any other expression Victor has thus elicited.
"Whatever helps you sleep at night."
Dean waggles his eyebrows.
"A lot of things help me sleep at night." He grabs a duffle bag. "C'mon, we're not staying here. I just used this address when I assumed you were some sick fuck pretending to be you." Dean says, chivvying Victor and Sam along.
"What about the devils trap?" Sam asks, flipping over the mat by the door to reveal a devils trap drawn in marker on the carpet.
"Leave it; it's not doing any harm." Dean shrugs.
Bone tired, still a little stunned at the wanton destruction and at the world the Winchester brothers opened his eyes to and seriously in need of time to decompress, Victor follows them to a different motel.
He'll ask the questions bubbling up inside tomorrow.
He thinks perhaps a change of career might be in order.
#
"Heard you died."
For once a flicker of a smirk doesn't greet him and there's something hollow under those green eyes.
"I did." The words are far too light.
"Good to see you back, can't have you bailing while there's still a job to do." Victor says with a sharp little grin, after all Dean isn't the only one who has flippancy down to an art form.
"Wouldn't dream of it."
Dean's different after his 'death'.
Victor later learns that he actually did die and went to hell only to claw his way out of his grave four months later.
He's brittle. Like one good push and he'll shatter into a thousand pieces.
Victor's knows enough to realise that you don't survive long in this life (hunting) with that attitude.
It would be a shame to bury Dean Winchester again.
#
They're like two peas in a very smart assed, crooked pod.
And from the glare Dean's shooting him, like he sort of hates him which is part of what makes them pretty good friends, Dean knows it too.
Victor remembers one of his mother's favourite sayings: 'If you can't beat them, join them'.
Bullshit.
Victor will wait until nightfall and then clobber Dean over the head.
It would solve a lot of his problems.
Dean's hand twitches for his gun. Victor guesses he's having similar thoughts.