...spn...

don't own any'tin

=spndrkangel=

The car ride to the home of 'Pastor Jim' was uneventful, mostly.

The boys efficiently packed up the room at Alec's order, handling the armory of blades and firearms with enough familiarity to make Alec flashback to his younger years.

Sammy, the younger, warmed up to Alec with relative ease, but Dean never took his eyes off the man or left them alone in the same room together. The ten year old even dragged Sammy into the bathroom with him.

Alec would have found this behavior amusing, if not for the fact that he was an unknown potential danger to these children and Dean was acting like a good little leader watching out for his unit.

Silence hung like a sheet cutting the car cleanly in two between the front and back seats. Sammy lay with his head on his brother's lap, eyes closed and sticky from dried tears. Dean remained resolutely awake, hands fisted on his brother's back. Alec could feel the tiny kid's eyes bore a hole into the back of his head.

Sammy whimpered, and Dean's attention shifted. He cooed nonsensical words, as though he barely remembered someone doing it for him once. "Don't worry Sammy, angels are watching over us." He mumbled into his brother's hair.

Huh, now Alec knew where Ben got that from, you know if you replaced 'angels' with 'Blue Lady'.

He wondered if he should discourage such behavior, but it apparently was somewhat genetic, so training Dean out of a bad habit would not affect Ben's behavior in the future. Maybe Manticore even wanted such delusional thinking. What if by trying to change his behavior, Dean was never singled out and-

Alec shook his head. Let's not go down that road of thinking this early in the morning.

He pulled over at a diner, (because, hey, kids need to eat right?) and spent the last of his, all be it stolen, money on pancakes, milk, and pie. Dean's eyes lit up for an instant at that last order, making Alec smile.

When it started to get dark, the transgenic left the kids in the Impala with a blanket and bag of chips between them with instructions to stay put till he got back. Several rounds of pool and a few hundred dollars richer, Alec pulled the car back onto the road towards this Jim guy's house, careful not to wake the sleeping bodies piled in the back seat.

=spndrkangel=

Alec did not have enough experience to say whether or not the church and pastor were what a normal church and paster looked like. He could, however, say with relative certainty that Pastor Jim was just as delusional as the former John Winchester was concerning things that go bump in the night.

It made his scam both harder and easier to sell.

"John told me to take care of the kids." Alec said, trying to keep his expression straight and free of anger when faced with this stubborn man of god. Said kids were bundled off into a back room somewhere catching up on some much needed food and rest.

Pastor Jim remained unconvinced. "John never mentioned you."

Alec wracked his brains for what he remembered of his brief impression of the dead man. "He wasn't the kind to share information needlessly."

Jim didn't make sign of disagreement, so Alec assumed he said the right thing.

"We were hunting in the woods together," technically true, sort of. Alec was trying to take down a Nomalie, and John was just coming back from hunting a stray werewolf, according to Dean anyway (Alec mentally snorted). "The thing jumped us and got to John before he could shoot it."

"You say you're a cousin of Mary's?"

"Yes." Alec mentally filed the name for later use.

"And you're a hunter?"

"Yep, since the day I was born."

The pastor hummed thoughtfully.

"I'm a hunter, don't worry about that." Cat DNA aside, Alec was a pure bred hunting machine. The man still looked skeptical. "Here, give me a mission if you don't believe me." As long as he assured this guy he was in on this delusion of monsters, he could keep the kids and, hopefully, ensure his creation some time in the future.

The pastor smiled. "Well, there's a haunting one town over..."

=spndrkangel=

When he told the boys he was going to hunt a ghost and that they better be good for Pastor Jim, Sammy's eyes got all dewy again. The kid threw himself at Alec's knees (the only part of the man he could easily wrap his arms around) and begged him not to go and disappear like daddy.

Dean refused to meet his gaze and stood a few feed away, his arms folded behind his back.

Recognizing that stance from years of practice, Alec tried to reassure the boys that nothing could hurt them, which ended in more tears on Sammy's part when he wailed something about his father saying the same thing.

In the end, since he couldn't tell the children that ghosts weren't real, he ended up asking them to help him prepare to calm them down.

Bu the time he got into the Impala, his pockets were stuffed full of rock salt (curtesy of Sammy), and his ears were ringing from a detailed lecture of ghost disposal (curtesy of Dean).

The whole experience was adorable in his opinion.

Alec traipsed into the house, shotgun loosely balanced on his shoulder. He would knock around the empty house for a bit, maybe fire off a shot if he was feeling ambitious. That should be enough to perpetuate this illusion of monsters and things that go bump in the night for the kids. He decided that an hour was a long enough time to mess around before gong back to the kids with harrowing tales of battling a ghost into submission.

He shivered and set down the gun to wrap his coat closer to his frame. Seriously, mid-west states sucked in the winter, it was always so cold.

His breath billowed around his mouth as he walked the hallway, kicking broken bits of furniture into the crumbling walls.

A dark head flickered at the corner of his eye. Turning his head, Alec blinked.

"What are you doing here this time of night?"

The hear turned, revealing the pale delicate features of a woman wearing a wispy white dress. Alec took a step back, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. This woman had no scent, and her feet left no imprint against the dusty floor.

"Well shit."

The transparent figure sneered at him, beautiful face morphing into a demonic sneer as it raised its arms.

Huh, ok. So, ghosts were real. Alec counted several points in his favor for adaptability, because he managed to absorb this information completely without suffering any mental hangups while simultaneously being thrown across the room by some kind of telekinetic force.

Shaking the worst of the broken wall's debris from his shoulders, the soldier wracked is brain for what his mini-maker had said about ghosts.

Let's see: people die, spirits unrested, salt and burn the bodies once identified, salt- Salt!

The specter lunged, claw like hands outstretched to scratch his eyes. Alec threw himself to the left towards the entryway where he had left the shotgun, but the ghost latched onto the sleeve of his jacket. He flailed, hands scrambling in his pockets for Sam's 'present'.

He woman screamed and shimmered out of existence when the rock salt hit her face.

Alec dashed to the door, remembering to snatch the gun on his way out.

He was so buying the kids ice cream after this.

=spndrkangel=

...

...

..

.