Title: Consequnces.
Pairing: Slow-burn Deanna/Castiel, past Deanna/Lisa.
Spoilers: Season 5 and 6.
Words: Too many. Way too many.
Warnings: Strong violence and swearing. Femslash. WIP. Mentions of non-con and torture. A tragic lack of Cas in the first few chapters.
Summary: Always-a-girl!Dean. As Deanna Winchester gives birth, history tries to repeat itself. AU series 6. Shockingly long fic. Lisa/Deanna, Castiel/Deanna.
I can't believe this chapter took over a month to write. This one really kicked my ass, as I'm unused to writing Sammy, and I've yet to actually watch more than a few clips of season six. But, anyway, enjoy!
With love to my college buddy, Adriana, and far-but-fond quovadimus83.
The Impala sped down the highway, chasing Sam's plastic piece of crap. It was a hot day, the windows were rolled down, wind stirring up her hair wildly and making the dark blonde shine like tarnished gold.
Cas sat beside her, eyes switching between tracking the strands of her hair and studying her face.
Deanna usually went for big guys with dangerous grins but it was difficult to remember that she couldn't kiss him until he was wild-eyed and so hard for her that he couldn't control his own strength anymore. He looked good in the sun; hot, handsome.
Her insides burned with a familiar heat, and she inwardly cursed herself for being so easy, so dickish and sex-obsessed and ungrateful to Lisa.
"What happened to your face?" Cas asked in his deep, growling voice.
"Crowley," Deanna responded shortly, licking the split in her lip absently. Her eyes were fixed on the road, but she could feel Cas shifting beside her, his gaze boring into the side of her face.
"Are you alright?" the concern in his voice was real and unhidden, rubbing an already irate Deanna in exactly the wrong way.
"Not as bad as it looks," Deanna snapped aggressively. Remembering Crowley's words, she flitted a look at the archangel, anger taking a backseat."But he, uh...said something about Sam."
Castiel (surprise, surprise) stared at her sharply.
Deanna looked away first, feeling something creeping down her spine, burning low and hot in her stomach whenever she looked at his face, his eyes. The hunter cleared her throat, glaring at the road. "About Sam's soul - that he doesn't have one."
There was a pause, and it weighed heavily on Deanna, a hailstorm of emotions in her stomach, all pretty goddamn intent to find out if something was wrong with Sammy, drowning out everything else.
There was a movement from the corner of her eye, and a soft hand touching her face like she was something precious, not a badass hunter with an A in demon-killing. Deanna's hands jerked on the wheel in surprise, making the Impala swerve sharply.
"Whoa! Cas!" the dim throb in her lip inceased, and then vanished entirely as the archangel healed her busted lip. Deanna hurriedly got her driving under control. "Give a girl some warning!"
Cas stared at her with solemn eyes, and his uncallused hand remained on her face, lingering in a way that made her burn with conflict, stomach swooping weirdly. "You needn't suffer unnecessarily."
"Well - " Deanna hesitated, licking her suddenly dry lips, unsure of exactly how to respond to that, and settled for dismissive. "Yeah, okay. But, dude, you gotta give me a little warning before you go around groping my face, 'else I'll pull a gun on you."
Castiel stared at her, something in his expression screamed 'mildly amused at your human ways'. "As I told Bobby, it won't have any effect on me."
"Yeah, but it might traumatize a few civilians - or the runts." There was a softening in Cas' flat expression that Deanna tried not to give a crap about. "Speaking of runts, about Sam...?"
Cas tilted his head at her, like a startled owl or something. "Sam is taller than you."
"Cas," Deanna snapped, recognizing his lame-ass distraction tactic. "What the hell is with you, man? I know you weren't too fond of the guy back when he was screwing Ruby but I figured things had changed."
Cas looked away, watching the highway pass by. Deanna flickered her eyes between him and Sam's car in front of her, not planning on losing her brother anytime soon.
"It isn't that," Cas said eventually, seemingly absorbed in staring at the hit-and-run animal bloodstains some drunken hick had caused.
"Then what is it?"
"It's very hypocritical of me," he confessed but there was no shame in his voice. "But he hurt you."
"You're damn right that's hypocritical of you," Deanna said in defense of her brother but she reached blindly over to forcefully pat Cas' shoulder to show that, hey, no hard feelings. "But I guess that's a Christian thing, huh, buddy?"
Deanna turned her head to grin at him and, despite the edge of disapproval in his eyes, Cas gave her one of his not-so-rare almost smiles in return.
What she felt for Cas was strong - raw and battered and pissed as hell, but intense and steady. Their bond was beaten and tarnished by both of their fuck ups and mistakes, but Deanna didn't feel like it wasn't worth the pain, like they couldn't fix it.
And that scared the shit out of her more often than not - but now? Not so much.
Deanna gunned the engine, and they sailed down the highway, wind roaring in their ears.
"Okay," Deanna started, surveying the ordinary grey building Sam had lead her too. It wasn't remarkable, but it sure as hell wasn't the run-down dive she'd been expecting him to show her. "Why are we casing Cooperation Douche-bag?"
Sam was sitting in the passenger seat, frowning at the building, and the familiarity of it made Deanna's breath catch with delight and old pain. "This Djinn isn't like the other one."
"What?" Deanna asked, eyebrows shooting up in surprise. "How? How is it not like the Djinn I ganked?"
"Because as far as me and Samuel can tell, it has a job. And it looks human," Sam added at the expression on her face, realizing that she was recalling the glowing-blue-tattooed-freak. "It can blend in."
"Awesome," she commented.
"And all they gotta do to kill you is touch you. Their toxins get into your system, and all of a sudden you're hallucination your worst nightmares."
"I remember that part pretty well," said Deanna grimly, recalling how rocky her relationship with that Sam had been. "If this thing is after me, then why is it hanging around South Dakota?"
"Trying to find you after you left Lisa's," said Sam. "It isn't a secret that Bobby's our strongest ally."
Hearing Lisa's name said so casually was like a punch to the stomach, and quick flashes of memory danced through Deanna's head before she could crush them. It hurt, almost as much as remembering that, after all of the shit they'd been through, Sam and Bobby had been keeping her in the fucking dark.
"How do we find this thing?" Deanna asked forcefully, staring at the flock of people going in and out of the building. "It's gotta be like finding the crazy dude in a pack of hunters."
Sam let out a faint, distracted snort, scanning the crowd with narrow eyes. "Not exactly - it'll be a lot easier."
Deanna stared at him, waiting for a deeper explanation. "Not exactly?" she prompted when he failed to pick up on the bolder-sized hint that Cas could've seen.
Instead of answering, Sam jerked his head at the crowd of people leaving the building. Annoyed, Deanna did so.
A hot chick with curly black hair was walking with a balding dude and another dude - she was way out of their league. All three of their heads were turned towards the Impala.
"Holy..." Deanna shook her head, exchanging her curse for a quip, "Guess this means we gotta mug little Bo-Peep."
"If you don't have a stake, we can borrow one from the Campbells," Sam offered absently.
"Already have one, Sam," Deanna grunted, glancing at him then back out the window. "Besides if I wanted to be on Oprah, I'd..."
Sam stared at her, a faint frown on his face. "What?"
Deanna shrugged it off with a tight smile. "Forget about it. Wasn't that funny anyway."
"Since when has that stopped you?" Sam asked, unconvinced but he stopped staring at her in favour of watching the Djinn.
Deanna allowed her smile to fall into a grimace.
Instincts or not, Crowley's bullshit or not, she'd have to tell her brother about the runts eventually. She was really starting to miss the little guys.
With a spike of worry, Deanna drummed her fingers on the dash and wondered how Bobby was coping with Mary (who was always especially bitchy in the afternoon) and Ben (who was just plain weird at times).
"We should come back later," Sam said eventually, glancing at her. "But until then-"
"They're gonna follow us," said Deanna, mostly to avoid meeting the Campbells.
She already hated the Christian dude, her brother's new hunting BFF, and if she met the guy in person, she'd probably take a swing at him. Sooner or later.
"So?" said Sam, shrugging. "The Campbells are hunters, like us. It wouldn't be a tragedy to lead the Djinn there, and we could use the back-up."
"Yeah, but we don't need it." Seeing him pull a Bitchface, Deanna cocked an eyebrow at him challengingly and added recklessly, "What's a few Djinn compared to the Devil, huh, Sammy?"
Sam stared at her expression for a moment before his gaze flickered to the Djinn. And he smiled, just a little quirk to the mouth, but it was there, and it was amazing to see. "Okay. So, we hang at a bar - "
"Not a bar," said Deanna. It would've been nice to toss a couple of beers back with brother but she'd already beaten one bar full of people into a pulp. "We have to find somewhere empty and wait it out there."
Deanna gave a cocky, devil-may-care grin. "Church or that empty jail a few miles back?"
To Deanna's slight surprise, Sam 'Goody-Two-Shoes' Winchester hesitated, almost like he wanted to trash a church too. "Jail."
Glancing back to see the three Djinn entering a crappy white car, Deanna started her car up and began driving to an old abandoned police station they'd passed by.
Breaking into a police station was just as easy as Deanna remembered busting out to be. The two hunters did a quick sweep of the place, just to make sure that no dumbass teenagers were lurking around like a bona fide horror movie.
Since jails were usually haunting grounds for pissed off spirits, they checked the place out on the web and with the EMF. After making sure the place was clean, Sam sat down on an old desk while Deanna remained standing, pacing a little, and awkwardness soon crept in.
Not wanting to talk about the big steaming pile of betrayal Sam had left on her doorstep, Deanna searched for a subject, absently passing the wooden stake soaked in lamb blood from hand-to-hand.
"So," said Deanna eventually, grinning wide and lewdly, "Bang any hot chicks lately?"
"Actually..." Sam dragged the word out a little while the female hunter's eyebrows arched in surprise, "Yes."
"Whoa," Deanna chuckled, pulling an impressed face. "Way to go, man."
"Bar chicks," said Sam, alluding to her favourite kind of people.
"Love 'em and leave 'em, huh, Sammy?"
The concept was pretty weird for Sam but it wasn't like Deanna, who had been bed-hopping since before she'd been legal, didn't understand the urge to just blow some steam off with a hot stranger.
And, yeah, okay, when an Angel of the Lord was getting laid more often than her brother, it started to become more pathetic than hilarious.
"There's no reason to stick around," said Sam dismissively with a shrug.
Just then, a deliberately loud creak echoed through the dusty old building.
The green-eyed woman stilled, grip tightening on the stake, and Sam slowly rose from the counter he'd been sitting on.
A long silence followed. But, using ears finely tuned from years of hunting, Deanna could pick up the faint scuff of footsteps on the floor - three different pairs, out of tune with the each other.
The hunter's body went tense, muscles coiling together, a low thrum of anticipation and adrenaline in her gut, working its way through her body.
Licking her bottom lip, she caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye. Sam had taken a step forward, and Deanna gave one sharp jerk of her head to stop him from taking another.
Sam's mouth tightened in resentment but he listened, putting his gigantic ass into park.
A low angry growl came from behind the doorway, and then a black and white blur was flying at Deanna, who dodged quickly - but not quick enough to save herself the fall. A heavy weight slammed into her chest, flooring her.
"Deanna!" Sam exclaimed.
Not wasting a second, Deanna drew her legs in and let them uncoil like a spring, almost donkey kicking the hot chick off her a heatbeat before the Djinn's bare skin made contact with hers. "Bitch!"
One of the dudes ninjaed out of the dark, crashing into Sam, who had more than a foot on him in height and twice that in muscle. But Deanna couldn't keep her eye on her nerdy brother for long as Black Hair came at her with Baldie for back-up.
The woman's fist hit her jaw, sending a shock of pain through her, then her claws lunged for Deanna's chin. Jerking her head back violently, Deanna smashed her jacket-clad elbow into the bitch's temple to disorientate her, and lept to her feet to throw one of her infamous right hooks at Baldie.
Baldie ducked under her fist, grabbing and twisting, almost twisting her around, sparks of pain shooting up her wrist, but then Deanna got a lucky shot between his legs.
Face crumpling in agony, Baldie went down, and Deanna plunged the stake remorselessly into his back, where his heart should be. A soft choked sound of pain escaped his mouth.
"NO!" Black Haur popped up with a feral scream of rage and agony, slamming her shoulder into Deanna's waist.
Deanna yelled wordlessly in pain as she was propelled backwards, back crashing into the wall with bruising force. Cobwebs and dust tumbled from the ceiling, making the hunter cough harshly.
Or maybe that was Black Hair's hand, pushing Deanna up the wall until her feet dangled while slowly crushing her throat. Not slipping her a magical-roofie, just strangling her.
Panicked, reacting on instinct as her skin began to tingle, Deanna grabbed frantically at the Djinn's hands. Black Hair's grip tightened, mouth twisting into a snarl.
"My brother..." she hissed softly, enraged. Deanna struggled, gasping desperately for air. "My father..."
And didn't that just bring back some awesome memories? Deanna let out a pained grunt as the Djinn tightened her grip.
"You killed them," she - it - snarled. "And now I'm going to kill you. And your brother," Black Hair finished, a dark satisfaction on her face that Deanna had seen on too many faces - her own, Sam's, recently, Ben's...
Ben, Mary, Sam.
A bolt of energy pulsed through her, catapulting her back into action. Betraying her instincts, Deanna stopped her hands from clawing at the female Djinn's, and threw a weak punch at the bitch's face.
The Djinn caught it easily, remaining hand picking up the pressure, and she let out a sneering laugh. "Weak," she announced in a hard voice. "You are - "
Deanna glared at the Djinn, her face stone-cold and hard as she easily looped a leg around the bitch's knee, and kicked. The Djinn lost her balance, crashing to the floor.
Not wasting the time landing would take, Deanna threw her shoulders back and bounced off the wall, over the Djinn, 'accidentally' kicking her in the head. Sparing Sam and the other Djinn a glance only to see them struggling but Sam could handle it for the moment, she grabbed her disgarded stake out of Baldie.
Deanna whirled around to see the Djinn back on its feet, leaning against the wall, glaring, face full of hatred.
"You mons- " she growled.
And Deanna was there, staking her in one fluid move. The Djinn's mouth parted, an almost surprised expression fluttering over her face as she fell back into the wall, a shocked sigh leaving her mouth...
Her body slid down the wall, and the hunter turned around again.
Sam and the Djinn were still grappling, but within the few seconds it took Deanna to gank the chick, things had changed. Instead of the Djinn trying to push the stake away from its chest, Sam was clutching the Djinn's wrist, teeth gritted, muscles bulging weirdly, trying to force the hand away from his face.
"SAM!"
The Djinn laid its hand on her brother's cheek just as Deanna lurched forward, horror struck. But nothing happened - Sam didn't begin to grey, or whatever the hell she or the Djinn had been expecting.
Instead, he bared his teeth in a snarl, punched the stunned Djinn to the floor, and stabbed viciously down, ramming the stake through the creature so hard that blood splattered his face.
His breathing was harsh as he almost reluctantly straightened up to face her, calmly wiping the blood from his face.
Sam met her stunned stare with a similar coolness. "Something wrong?"
Deanna carved a smile onto her face, though her blood was cold with fear for her brother, who she'd already lost way too many times, and her insides were knotted together in dread and suspicion. "I don't know about you, but I could really use a beer."
"So," said Deanna, taking a swig of her requested beer, pursing her lips in approval at the taste. "How come the Djinn's love-tap didn't work on you?"
The Campbells were squatting in a run-down house not far from the old jail. So far her relatives had turned out to be a bunch of freaks - a douche-bag, a mute, a lady that thought she was 'cute', an old guy zombie.
And whatever the hell might be up with Sam this year.
Across the table from her, Samuel Campbell smiled at her like a creepy uncle, and every instinct of Deanna's was telling her to get the fuck outta there. Instead she summoned up a fake-ass smile.
Sam shrugged in response to her question, eyebrows raising to convey puzzlement. "I don't know."
"Mm-huh," Deanna hummed with blatant skepticism. "Okay."
Irritation crossed Sam's face, and his eyebrows went back down. "I don't. I mean - I've been in Hell, it could be that. Or it could be something else. I don't know, Deanna."
Samuel straightened in his chair a little to offer yet another clue to the bursting group of them Sam was tossing out. "You could still be protected by the cure."
"Whoa." Deanna raised a hand to stall them. "Whoa," she repeated, feeling it deserved her best effort. Her eyebrows moved high up her forehead. "Cure? What cure?"
Deanna witnessed the glance Sam and Samuel exchanged with annoyance bubbling under her skin.
"To the Djinn's venom," said Samuel, returning his eyes to her.
"Yeah, that I guessed. I didn't know a Djinn cure existed."
"Oh, I know a few things," said Samuel braggingly. "Stick around and I'll show you a few things your daddy never even dreamed of."
"Uh-huh." Unconvinced, Deanna glanced between the two. Her bullshit detecter was finely honed, and she definitely remembered checking out an assload of Djinn lore as a kid and with Sam.
A rush of anger filled her. How much of an idiot did Sam think she was? Sure, she hated research, liked to drink and screw around, but that didn't mean she had a swish cheese brain.
Part of her wanted to start raging at the two of them but Deanna stilled the impulse, realizing that she was outnumbered. But a worse realization punched her in the face; all the lies and the Djinn crap suggested that maybe, just maybe, Crowley wasn't lying.
Her Sammy walking around as a soulless monster. The thought made her fucking sick straight to the stomach. She should've done something, said yes to Michael and killed the Devil before Sam could even consider consenting.
"Say..." the hollow smile was unchanging on her face. "Did you take care of that Wendigo back in Minnesota?"
Sam blinked at her change of subject, looking so genuine and human that Deanna started to hope that she was just going crazy...
"No. We went straight after you."
Deanna's blood turned to ice, her stomach twisted with the confirmination. She felt like hurling, she felt like screaming and beating the shit out of him for making her think that she'd gotten her brother back after a year, lies or no.
She almost missed Sam leaning forward to look at her earnestly, continuing. "I wanted us to patch things up. I missed you."
"I missed you too, Sammy." The affectionate pet-name curdled on her tongue.
Demons lied; always. No matter what or how they span something, it was all bullshit. Meg, Ruby, Crowley. Deanna was the Winchester sibling that didn't fall for their bullshit tricks but her willingness to blindly believe the shit Sam was shoving took a serious hit after the demonic skank.
Hell could do a number on anyone, and, okay, sure, maybe that was the reason the Djinn's dream-world crap hadn't worked on Sam - because he didn't want, like how Famine's mojo hadn't worked on her - but letting a Wendigo run loose was a pretty good indicator.
Pulling into Bobby's scrapyard, Deanna stormed out of the car, slamming the door shut behind her and turning towards the house. Cas was already outside, Mary in his arms.
"Cas?"
Then she blinked, and he was there, like an inch away from her, and glaring at her like she'd she'd talked smack about his Dad again. Deanna recoiled automatically, and he followed her, eyes blazing, hair and trenchcoat rippling from an unexpected gust of wind.
He looked far too impressive and scary than a man holding a baby should be.
"Dude! What the he - "
"Why did you not inform me about Crowley?" he growled, ditching modern speak entirely.
Deanna would have assumed he meant about this morning if not for the telling but entirely unconscious way Cas adjusted their girl to his chest, slight arms clutching her protectively.
"Who told you? Gabriel?"
"Ben," was his terse reply.
Deanna was willing to bet, going by the heat in his eyes, that if he hadn't have been holding Mary their conversation would be more of a gripped arms, glaring eyes and agonizing sexual tension thing. Which...was a good thing.
That, you know, they weren't doing that. Her self-control was pretty poor.
"I was - "
"But you didn't," he snapped, cutting across her ruthlessly.
"I didn't have the time!" Deanna growled back, snapping out of her shock at how terrifying and hot Cas looked to defend herself. A year old frustration and abandonment and hurt all boiled over. "And if you'd have been here before, this wouldn't have been a problem!"
Cas...flinched, mouth drawn and eyes flashing with a raw, shocked hurt, like he hadn't expected it. He stopped glaring and glowering and looming at her, and just...
It made her chest ache with sudden shock of pain, her stomach sour with guilt and, shit. Like she didn't feel bad about enough between Lisa and Ben and Sam and all those souls in Hell. And every-fucking-thing inbetween.
"I didn't..." she cleared her throat, unable to unstick the apology from her throat. "I think Crowley was right about Sam's soul."
Before she could explain, Cas interrupted her in a quiet strong voice. "I am more concerned with our child."
"That..." isn't important right now, a huge part of Deanna raged. But the words stuck like bile in her throat, tasting like ashes and self-disgust and wrong.
If there was one thing that Deanna was completely, utterly, earth-shakingly sure about, it was that Sam - her greeky brother, her partner-in-crime, her responsibility - was more important than anything else in the whole goddamn world.
The conviction had stayed solid through all of Sam's abandonments and Ruby and forty years of torture and Hell; it wasn't about to break now.
But a more recent truth was taking hold, rooting itself just as deeply into her screw-up mind as the first: Mary was too.
"Bobby's place is as demon-proof as it gets," she said instead, glancing down at her boots. There was maybe an inch between her and Cas. The back of the Impala pressed against her thighs.
Following her gaze, Cas backed off a little, still way too deep in her personal space. "Yet Crowley has already gained access."
Deanna cracked her neck before pushing off the Impala. "Unless you've got a secret bag of angel tricks hidden up your sleeve, there's nothing we can do about that, sweetheart."
The term of endearment slipped so throughtlessly out of her mouth that the hunter didn't realise she'd said it until Cas' stiff expression relaxed a little.
Then he seemed to have a Eureka moment. "There is a way to ward against demons indefinitely."
"Really? Huh." That was unusually lucky for them. A sudden thought hit Deanna, making her eyebrows jump up. "Wait, why haven't you done this before?"
"It requires power I did not possess until recently," Cas replied, a little flick of pride in his voice.
Deanna remembered his words about the archangels back when he was just a low-level grunt, the wariness and faint touches of awe in his voice - nigh unheard of way back then. "Awesome," she grinned. "Guess there are some perks to hanging with an archangel."
"Many," he responded, holding her gaze almost promisingly. A fizzle of heat snapped into existance, burning through her blood.
Deanna's tongue darted out of her mouth to wet her lip, and, bingo, his eyes flickered to the movement.
And then Cas turned his head away, shifting Mary in his arms as though to remind himself that she was still there, unusually peaceful and unreactive to raised voices. He was probably keeping their daughter under while he tore her a new one.
"This will be easier now that you have a permanent residence."
The word 'permanent' automatically raised Deanna's hackles, "We're not sticking around for long."
Cas accepted this without question, though he did look faintly...
"Okay. I'm guessing cock-blocking all these all demons is something only an archangel has the mojo to do?"
Cas hesitated at her wording. "Yes."
"But it drains if you do it often enough? Which you can't afford because the Ninja Turtle is kicking your ass."
Looking his version of annoyed at her description of his civil war, Cas said, "I cannot spare the energy to ward all of your motel rooms."
"Uh-huh," Deanna said, figuring there would be a catch to something so useful. "How about you ward the Impala..." she trailed off, realizing that Cas wasn't the only archangel on her shoulder. Though Gabriel had been oddly absent since he'd shown up. "We could ask Gabriel to ward Bobby's?"
There was an irritating tug on her insides just as Cas frowned a little at her suggestion, followed by the obnoxious flutter of wings and a drawling voice that caused Deanna's blood pressure to spike automatically, "I've been wondering when you crazy kids would call!"
Deanna and Cas turned their heads at exactly the same time to look at the short, blond archangel.
Gabriel leered at their positions, taking in how close they stood, how Deanna was just about pinned to her car, and he practically inhaled the tension in the air. "Am I interrupting something?"
