Author's note: I actually fell in love with Supernatural fan fiction before I ever watched the show (not sure what on earth took me so long) so I'm way overdue in posting a story of my own. This is one of two I have in progress right now, but this one's closer to completion, so it's going up first.

This weird tale came about because I was reading another story and thought I knew which direction the author might be going in. They didn't go that way at all; I was way off, but it had spawned an idea that wouldn't go away, so I wrote it myself!

Disclaimer: All credit to Kripke & Crew, and to the fans that make reading and writing in this fandom so much fun!


The Importance of Being Dean

Chapter One


"I'm fine."

Sam scowled as his brother headed the Impala west on US 30 out of Boone, Iowa. That had been Dean's mantra for the last twelve hours. Sam kept asking though, and Dean wasn't changing his story.

They'd caught wind of a hunt in the Ledges State Park that had turned out to be a little more complicated than anticipated. The wendigo they'd expected to find terrorizing campers was there alright, but they discovered it'd been harnessed by a teenage pagan who'd been leeching power from the Native American mounds in the area to control the wendigo into attacking kids who'd teased her at school.

Course that hadn't sat too well with the local spirit population, and the pagan's interference had raised a Sauk guardian spirit that started its own brand of trouble in retaliation. Sam had found a purification ritual to use on the park grounds, and yesterday they'd headed out well before dusk to set up in an area they knew the wendigo - the local LEOs thought it was a bear - had been spotted during the last week. Crunching through fallen leaves, they'd chosen a small space between the trees a little ways off of a hiking trail, hopefully far enough from the public campsites to avoid attracting attention from anyone crazy enough to be camping in this weather. It was a cold Thursday in late November, so fortunately the park was barely populated, with more rangers on the acreage than guests. It smelled of slowly decaying vegetation, and the woods were damp from regular morning frosts that never got a chance to evaporate in the shade. The brothers both shivered and drew their coats tighter against the chilly air.

The ritual had to be done at sunset, which had put Dean on edge. He preferred hunting this particular monster in daylight. He walked a perimeter as the the sun touched the horizon, and Sam had started the ritual. And true to Winchester luck, the pagan had shown up with her 'pet' in tow.

Dean had barely managed to hold off the wendigo long enough for Sam to finish. It kept attacking in close quarters, so Dean couldn't get off a shot with the flare gun, but got a few decent slashes in with his blade while the pagan girl raged from the tree line. Then finally Sam tossed the last bundle of blessed herbs into his clay bowl of coals, and it'd sparked into the air in the directions of the north-south-east-west talismans they'd buried in the park earlier in the day. With a few last words, the pagan's binding magic on the wendigo broke, and suddenly Dean wasn't grappling with the monster anymore as it had turned and made straight for the girl.

Apparently wendigos were intelligent enough to get pissed off for being messed with.

Sam looked at Dean and his brother had stared back grimly. Neither enjoyed the sound of the girl's screams as the wendigo shredded her, but they'd argued about how to deal with the vengeful pagan when this was all over. They never liked the idea of putting down a human, but she was apparently remorseless and the type to kill again. Problem solved.

They hadn't spoken as her screams abruptly cut off, but raised their weapons at the same time, and twin flares rocketed off side by side into the wendigo's back. The monster roared in agony as it erupted in flames and was quickly consumed. What was left of its mutated corpse fell to the ground as a burned-out husk, where it smoked and steamed on the wet leaves.

Dean was about to slap his brother on the back for a job well done and suggest they toast the pagan's body and make for the nearest bar, when a ghostly shape flickered into being just ten feet ahead of them. Dean's gun was out and aimed instantly.

"The guardian spirit," Sam had breathed. "Are you loaded with salt?"

"Nope. Silver." Dean still kept the gun up. It made him feel safer even if it was ineffective. "Thought you said it was supposed to be benign or protective or some shit."

"She is."

According to lore, the Native American guardian was the ghost of a shaman or witch bound to the land by ancient ritual to look after the resting place of her people. It had appeared with its back to them, and she slowly turned, long hair framing a face blackened with charcoal in mourning for her dead. She was young and thin, and wore a plain black dress with little shape to it. She stared at Sam, who began to feel uncomfortable as her stern gaze bored into him. She'd started to speak, but it was in her native language. From the pitch of the sound, she was asking a question.

"You get any of that?" Dean asked from the side of his mouth, gun remaining level.

"Uh, no, sorry." Sam shifted a bit closer to his brother. "Doesn't seem like she's attacking. As far as we've been able to tell, she hasn't actually been causing any of the deaths."

"Yeah, well I ain't taking any chances. Time to beat a retreat, Sammy," Dean had said, keeping his voice low and his eyes on the spirit. "The scene'll keep. We'll come back tomorrow to take care of the pagan bitch's body and bring plenty of rock salt in case this one shows up again."

It wasn't ideal, but not seeing another option, Sam had nodded, and they'd started backing away slowly.

A sharp pronouncement from the guardian stopped them in their tracks. Suddenly she was closer, nearly in Sam's face as she spoke again demandingly, still in her native tongue. She had asked another question, this time gesturing at Dean, but still looking at the younger Winchester.

"I'm sorry! We can't understand you," Sam floundered. "We were helping stop that monster...you should be able to rest again now."

The guardian had cocked her head, once again looking them over intently, then nodded sharply; decisively. She hadn't looked angry, and they'd started to think this would end peaceable, when her hand had suddenly shot up straight towards Dean's chest. An orange light left her palm, curled around him like a wraith, and sank into the hunter before he could dodge.

"What the hell!" he'd shouted.

Dean reacted, firing two rapid shots that passed harmlessly though the guardian, and Sam had his reloaded flare gun back out and aimed. The guardian spirit had just nodded at them again, this time looking pleased, spoke a couple last words, and vanished with a breeze that clattered empty tree branches together.

"What was that! What did she do?" Sam panicked, checking Dean over even as his older brother tried to shove him off.

"I have no idea, but I'm fine. I don't feel weird or anything."

"That doesn't mean it was nothing!"

Sam was making attempts to check Dean's pupils, like creepy spirit mojo was going to be visible there. Dean stepped on Sam's toes when he spun out of reach. Totally not on purpose.

"It means whatever she tried didn't work! C'mon, Sammy, she's gone, so we've got a job to finish."

"She didn't look like she thought she messed up, Dean! Whatever she meant to do, we've gotta assume it worked!"

"Sam! I'm okay, alright? Let's go."

Sam had grumbled the entire trek to the car and back to get a bag of rock salt from the trunk, continuously watching Dean for signs of a curse or spell. Dean kept brushing Sam off, and Sam's foot might have gotten stepped on a few more times, but Dean'd been hiding his own concern. Sam had a point when he said they should assume the magic had worked. But he felt fine; completely normal. At least nothing was tingling or falling off or changing colors.

And he couldn't fight a curse before he knew what it was. So he figured if the orange light was gonna do anything, he'd deal with it when it happened.

They'd made quick work of burning the pagan's corpse and went back to their motel to shower. When Sam came out of the bathroom, the motel room was empty, but apparently Dean's inclination for a night out had died, cause he'd come back through the door a little while later with a couple diner to-go boxes and a plastic sack bearing the logo of a nearby quickie mart.

He pulled a six-pack out of the bag, catching the cardboard corners on the thin plastic before it came free, and grabbed a beer. The glass bottle was already sweating thanks to the determined old heater clunking away under the window, making the room smell of heating element and getting it slightly toastier than was actually comfortable.

Sam had tried turning it down their first night in the room, but it was stuck on the one temperature. Sam'd sweated and complained. Dean'd called him a sissy and told him to be glad it worked at all since the motel was probably a thousand years old. Sam told Dean that was ridiculous, since electric heaters weren't invented a thousand years ago, and Dean had hit Sam in the head with a tiny shampoo.

Dean claimed one of the to-go boxes, popped open his beer, and settled on his bed with the remote. Sam opened his mouth, but with another "Shut it, Sam, I'm fine," Dean had flicked on the TV and effectively ended the conversation for the night. Sam pursed his lips in frustration, grabbed his laptop, and had spent the rest of the evening researching Native American guardian magic.

According to what little he'd found, the Sauk guardian drew her magic from nature, and it wasn't inherently either good or evil. Whether the results of the magic were beneficial or destructive depended on her intentions, and since the uses for natural magic were practically infinite, Sam had no obvious way to find out what the purpose of that particular spell had been. It made him nervous, and he didn't sleep well.

They'd gotten up early the next morning and packed, ready to blow town. Dean took them through a drive-thru and ordered tacos for breakfast, dropping the paper sack smelling of chili-flavored grease and cheese onto Sam's lap. Breakfast of champions, indeed.

There was really no point in going back to the park, since they weren't sure how to make the protective spirit manifest again now that her reason for being raised was gone. Dean still seemed okay, so he was willing to call himself lucky and move on, but Sam kept arguing that they needed to know what the guardian had done. He wanted to go to Bobby's to check out the older hunter's library and be sure everything was alright.

Now, headed out of Boone, Sam was still trying to make his case.

"Dean, just cause nothing's happened yet doesn't mean it won't," he protested, squeezing a little packet of sauce onto a taco for Dean while his brother drove. "We're only four hours away from Bobby's. Please let's just stop by and have him take a look to make sure."

The thoughtful set set to Dean's face told Sam he was close to getting his way. He handed Dean his taco, licked his fingers clean of fire sauce, and went in for the kill.

"We haven't had a weekend off in a while anyway, and it's not like we aren't already headed that direction. I bet Bobby would even break out his grill for us if we asked him. Or maybe a late Thanksgiving. A few home-cooked meals would be nice..."

Dean shot a look at Sam's perfectly innocent face. The kid was playing dirty.

He heaved a sigh. "Fine. But only cause you're such a girl that you won't stop worrying until I say yes."

Sam grinned as Dean used one hand to turn north onto the still two-lane 169. It would add half an hour to their trip to Sioux Falls, but they had less chance of running into state patrol. Their brush with the law in Baltimore earlier that month was enough to last them for a while.


A little over four hours later, after the crumpled taco papers had been joined on the floor by an army of little empty White Castle boxes, they were pulling into Bobby's salvage yard, through the graveyard of cars and up to the old house.

Sam slammed his way out of the passenger side, trying to escape the argument Dean had somehow managed to keep going for the last fifteen miles.

"All I'm saying, Sammy," Dean was saying in a rare lighthearted tone as he emerged from the other side of the car, "is that he was perfectly justified. Any good hunter knows the signs of an enemy about to strike. And if you don't wanna get taken, you do what you gotta."

Sam whirled back around just as Dean had known he would. The younger Winchester had always been too easy to rile up.

"It's Sam. And I never said he wasn't justified!" Sam whined and Dean grinned. How had they even gotten on this topic? "I just said that kids watch it too, and that it makes sense from a film standpoint that they changed it! It made Han more sympathetic."

"Sure, whatever. Doesn't change the fact that everyone knows that he really shot first."

Sam saw Bobby heading towards them from the garage, wiping his hands on a rag, and leapt at the chance to end the conversation. He knew Dean was intentionally messing with him.

"Hey, Bobby!" he greeted the older man in a tone that was less 'hello,' and more 'save me!' "D'you mind if we stay a few days and use your library? How much have you got on Native American spirit magic?"

"You know yer welcome here, Sam," Bobby affirmed. "Heard tell a crossroads demon down south got bamboozled couple weeks back. That you?"

Sam grimaced at the memory of the nerve wracking hunt, and glanced at Dean, who'd fetched their duffles out of the trunk and was coming over with one in each hand. "Yeah. That one was a little rough."

The elder Winchester reached them and nodded hello to Bobby, who was watching him curiously. "How's it going, Bobby?" Dean handed Sam his bag. "Okay, Encyclopedia Brown, go get your groove on so we can prove there's nothing wrong with me and I can get some grub." He winked at Bobby.

The boys turned to head for the house. But the next thing out of their long-time friend's mouth drew them back to a startled halt.

"Who's this?" Bobby was asking. "You hunting with a partner now, Sam? Cause I can't say it wouldn't set my mind at ease some."

Sam and Dean both stared at Bobby, their cheer melting slowly away. They looked at each other in confusion.

"What?" Sam sputtered.

"Yer friend here." Bobby's eyebrows raised, and there was no question that he meant Dean. "Ain'tcha gonna introduce me?"


To be continued.