It Runs In The Family
Author: Cheryl W.
Disclaimer: I do not own any characters or any rights to Dark Angel or Supernatural, nor am I making any profit from this story.
Summary: Crossover with Dark Angel and Supernatural –AU. Dean, Sam and Alec's continuing adventures. No slash.
Author's Note: Well since Supernatural is preempted for baseball tonight (insert pout here)…I thought I would use my time wisely until it came on at 12:30am and post this chapter.
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Chapter 25 – What Matters Most – part 17
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Steering his newly hotwired vehicle onto the highway, Sam couldn't help but commend himself on his choice: an inconspicuous '85 grey, beat up truck. Nothing flashy like his brothers had chosen. And, contrary to Dean and Alec's predictions, the truck had a robust engine under the rusted hood, was probably used to working the farm, hauling machinery and hay from one acre to another.
Needless to say, no one argued when he said he would drive first.
With a final whine, Dean had conceded defeat and slid into the middle of the benchseat, groused that he knew how a burger felt jammed between bread when Alec climbed in and shut the door. For three men who all topped six feet, it was a little bit of a tight fit. Alec chimed in with the word 'Cozy' but that comment earned him a death glare from Dean.
But Dean's displeasure with his new accommodations, it didn't last.
When Dean fell silent, Sam spared a look from the road to check on his brother. He couldn't help the tender smile at the sight that greeted him: Dean slumped against Alec in exhaustive sleep.
Thinking to share a smirk with Alec at their big bad brother looking so vulnerable, Sam was surprised to see Alec looking down at Dean's slack features with trepidation. Alec looked nervous, like he had been asked to hold a baby instead of just letting his brother use his shoulder as a pillow. And Sam could have sworn that Alec was regulating his breathing, was keeping it shallow, as if he worried that his inhale/ exhale would joggle Dean awake.
Taking pity on his brother, Sam quietly ensured, "He's out."
Alec's eyes snapped up to Sam's, knew by his brother's warm but teasing expression that his discomfort had been observed. But, darn it, he was used to Dean being the pillar of strength. And it was more than that. Manticore had made sure that he knew more about hurting ordinaries than …than holding them.
"If you want to move him…" Sam offered, didn't know how to interpret the emotion in Alec's eyes right then.
"No!" Alec emphatically refused before he dropped his voice to a whisper. "No." The last thing he wanted to do was to break the connection with Dean, to forfeit the trust Dean was showing him. When Sam nodded, returned his focus to the road, showed his own trust in him to not further hurt their brother, Alec slumped lower in the seat until Dean's head rested more comfortably on his shoulder.
Alec held his breath as Dean stirred. But Dean didn't skitter away from his presence, instead he leaned more heavily against him. 'I should have thought to get some ice,' he chided himself as he noted that the bruises were staring to make their appearance on Dean's features. His gut tightened at the thought of Dean taking on the 4 man squad all alone. Course, leave it up to Dean to not only thrash the squad but have the presence of mind to grab a phone and one of their trackers off them.
"You know what Dean's plan is? What's in Tennessee?" he quietly asked, lifting his eyes from Dean to watch Sam's profile.
"No," Sam grimly admitted. Dean was being closed mouthed about his plans, had simply said head for Tennessee. From past experience, he knew that, whenever Dean purposefully avoided outlining a plan, it was because he knew his little brother wouldn't like it, not one bit.
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A light tapping on his cheek pulled Dean from his dreamless sleep. Before the new chain of events fell into place, he panicked at the realization that he had dozed off, that he was letting down his guard. Jerking upright, he slammed his knee into the dashboard, recoiled as a hand fell on his shoulder and whipped his head to the right.
"Hey, easy. We're just stopping for some breakfast," Alec calmly said, easily pinpointed the second Dean knew where he was and who he was with.
Heart skittering back to normal at the sight of Alec, of realizing he wasn't on his own, that there was someone there to have his back, Dean didn't allow his relief to show, instead mumbled, "What state are we in?" Rolling his neck, he nonchalantly determined that Sam was already out of the truck, was still standing in the open door, watching him.
"Just passed the Tennessee border," Sam supplied, inspecting Dean, found his brother had an impressive array of bruises on the left side of his face. With the bandages around his neck and wrist and the contusions on his face, Dean looked like he had been involved in a horrific crash.
"Really," Dean drawled, impressed at the progress his brother had made. But instead of lavishing praise on Sam, he patted the truck's dashboard. "Old girl did good."
"She's not KITT, Dean. She didn't drive herself across two states," Sam grumbled but knew he had been had when Dean's cut lip flipped up into a smile.
"Someone's a little grumpy this morning," Dean taunted but it was Alec who gave a comeback.
"We're tired too, Dean. You know why that is?" Alec cuttingly challenged, didn't wait for a reply before he continued. "Because we spent the last couple of days chasing your butt, worried that you were going to get yourself killed." His anger surfacing because, though he had just spent the last couple of hours basking in Dean's presence, in Sam's, with his happy relief had also come a harsh awareness of how things might have turned out differently. Dean could have kept running from them, could have been captured or even gotten himself killed.
"This from the guy who said he wished he never met me," Dean sallied back, the words just coming out, unintentionally having been waiting in the wings for the right time to throw them in Alec's face, to see if his brother meant them…then or now.
All the color drained out of Alec's face at Dean's offhanded echo of his own words. "Dean, I didn't mean that."
"He knows that," Sam snapped, glaring at Dean, silently ordering his brother to play nice. "Now get out of the truck. We're not staying long."
"Now who sounds like Dad," Dean muttered under his breath as he scooted across the seat and jumped out of the truck onto the restaurant's parking lot. As the threesome walked into the restaurant, they scanned their surroundings, took in every face, catalogued every exit and unconsciously fingered the guns they had tucked into their waists.
They ate in silence, the things they needed to talk about, the things each wanted to say taking a backseat to their hunger, to the simple contentment of engaging in a normal family ritual of having a meal together. Even the waitress seemed loath to speak in their silence, refilling their coffee cups without prompting or conversation and hurriedly leaving the three good looking men to their privacy.
So it was only after their meal was down to crumbs that Sam turned in his seat to face Dean. "Ok, so what's this plan you have."
"It's a good one, don't worry."
"Right, it's so good you don't want to tell us," Alec perceptively surmised, sharing a conspiring look with Sam.
"Don't want to tell you all my trade secrets," Dean repelled Alec's speculation, his cocky smile on full power.
But Sam was used to bulldozing through Dean's deflections. "Too bad, Dean. Spill. Now, where are we headed?"
"Place just outside Savannah," Dean vaguely supplied, finding the bottom of his empty coffee cup fascinating.
Sam's gut clenched. Dean's avoidance of a direct answer sent warning flares through him. With controlled evenness, he pressed, eyes on Dean, tracking his brother's every facial tick, "What place just outside Savannah?"
"Pittsburg Landing," Dean meekly admitted, already cringing internally, knowing that the explosion was about to come. Sam didn't disappoint.
Sam's outburst was instantaneous. "What? The Morton House wasn't enough fun for you? You wanna try our luck at the battle of Shiloh's most haunted house, too! If the Morton House was our Grand Canyon, what is this? Our Tijuana?"
"Ok, you two lost me," Alec interjected but neither brother paid him any attention.
"Sam, just hear me out," Dean pressed, watched Sam's jaw clench but a moment later give way to a curt nod. "Manticore invited me into their little shop of horrors so I'm inviting them into mine. Turn around is fair play."
Slowly but surely, Sam's jaw unclenched and a light of understanding dawned. "Lead them into the field hospital…"
"And we get out before things go South…or North as the case may be," Dean said, smirking at his own joke.
Alec waved his hand between his brothers' locked eye contact. "Yo, new ghost buster here. You're talking gibberish to me."
Turning to face Alec, Dean began to explain things with the patience and kindness that Sam always admired in his brother. "The civil war battle of Shiloh was fought near Pittsburg Landing."
Alec nodded. "Manticore did a quick facts-only overview of the Civil War. Shiloh was a bad mother of a battle, I remember that much."
Sam interjected a vital piece of the story. "The casualties were over 25,000."
Knowing that his brothers didn't usually talk just to hear themselves, Alec stamped down his impatience for them to get to the major plot point already. "Nice recap of history but what does that have to do with the horde of Manticore's finest heading our way?"
Sparing Alec another few minutes of great but secondary information, Sam bluntly stated, "Troubled souls. Lots of them. With carnage like the battle of Shiloh, the battlefields and surrounding areas are rampant with spirits. And one farm house in particular is .."
"Ghost headquarters," Dean picked up the narrative again. "Last people who tried to spend the night there, well, they didn't see the light of day."
"Alright, I'm officially creeped out. So why this particular house?" Alec asked, eyes tracking between Dean and Sam, hoping that it would all make sense soon.
Dean sighed, rubbed his brow, never liked recounting massive deaths as if he were a detached narrator for some A&E special. "The farm lane leading to the house was nick-named the Hornet's Nest because of the heavy artillery fire that rained down from and to that position. Union guys hunkered down there on the lane and picked off the Confederates as they approached their position, then the Confederates returned the favor in a big way by lobbing cannonballs at them."
"And the Fraley's farm house was used as a field hospital," Sam added, knew that fact was as vital as the sunken road battle.
It started to make grim sense to Alec and he wished that it didn't. "Lots of dead and dying in violent ways, got it. And so you want those ghosts to do our dirty work for us, take out Manticore's troops. I'm not opposed to that but how do we tell the ghosts that we're the good guys? Do we need to dig up some Union or Confederate uniforms?"
"As the saying goes, the freaks come out at night," Dean offhandedly said.
Seeing Alec's confusion, Sam explained, "Legend goes that the ghosts only appear after dark."
"Ok," Alec drawled, felt a tinge of uneasiness that they were betting their lives on a legend. "So we lure the Manticore hit squad into the house and then what? We sneak out the back before night fall and let old soldiers get reacquainted with new soldiers?" a tinge of disbelief and reproof in his tone for a strategy that he thought offered all risk with only a minimal shot at success.
Undeterred by his brother's tone, Dean smirked. "Yeah, something like that. When the sun goes down, they all go to the big battleground in the sky. But I lure them in."
"No, it's all of us!" Sam refuted, tension singing along his nerves at even the thought of Dean walking into that house alone, without him.
Dean sent Sam an incredulous look. "You think the Manticore soldiers are all going to go charging in like they did back at the house, let us blew more of them up? No, they will hold some of their numbers back. You two need to handle the ones that stay outside."
But Sam had been swayed far too many times into letting Dean do something stupid. "I'm not letting you go into that house alone, Dean," his voice hard and unwavering, sure proof that he wasn't going to settle for anything less than a full victory.
"I wouldn't be alone, Sammy. I will probably have lots of company," Dean joked back but Sam's glare turned even more glacier.
"You think I'm going to back down, let you do things your own stubborn, reckless way but I'm not," Sam hissed back, deliberately keeping his voice low though he wanted to shout loud enough to shake the restaurant's rafters.
Afraid that World War III would soon erupt, Alec snapped, "Hey, I'm part of this too!" snagging both of his brothers' attention. "It's the stupidest plan I've ever heard of…" seeing Dean' hurt scowl, he relented, "But I'll go along with it because I trust you. Both of you," his look encompassing Sam. "But just so we're clear. Any one of us not walking away from this, that isn't acceptable. We can't risk losing each other again, we just…can't."
Alec's fearless way of voicing his feelings, of telling them how he felt about them, of alluding to how they felt about each other had Dean looking away and Sam scoffing his fingernail along the Formica table.
Recognizing that he had embarrassed his macho brothers into silent, avoidance mode, Alec sighed. Shaking his head, he wondered, 'How did I, the engineered assassin, end up being the sensitive one in the family?!' But he wasn't, by any means, a pushover, proved it by demanding, "So, look me in the eye and tell me this is the best, safest plan we can come up with."
Simultaneously his brothers' heads snapped up, their eyes landed on him and they confidently replied.
"It is," Dean firmly vowed even as Sam petulantly growled, "It's not."
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There were advantages to being the oldest, Dean smugly thought. Fighting to keep the smirk of victory off his features, he climbed out of the truck, watched as his brothers did the same. Sam and Alec might not like his plan, might down right hate it…but they were following his lead, trusted that, no matter how reckless he might be with his own life, he never was with theirs. Well, almost never.
This plan, his plan, it was going to work. Mostly because it had to. The other options? Him and his brothers trying to outrun Manticore for another couple of weeks? He knew how that ultimately would end, for all of them. No, his plan gave them a fighting chance. And if there was one thing his family knew how to do, it was fight.
So with bags of weapon laden bags swung over their shoulders, the three Winchesters stood at the wire mesh fence, purposefully turning blind eyes to the "No trespassing, violators will be prosecuted" signs posted on the fence. The house that lay behind the fence was in sad repair, had probably not seen a paintbrush, nails or inhabitants in half a century.
"I'm a brave guy, I am. But this place…" Alec shivered, the white dilapidated farm house looked about as uninviting as a coffin. And it offered the same dark essence that the evil dead always did, but ten fold.
Sam couldn't have agreed more with Alec. "Tell me about it," he muttered.
Showing no such reservations, Dean snapped the deadbolt off with cutters and swung the gate open.
Grabbing Dean by the arm, Sam jerked his brother to a halt before he crossed over the property's boundary line. "You sure about this? If the legend is wrong…"
"Like the Morton house legend was wrong," a challenge in Dean's statement.
A little miffed by Dean's bragging, Sam angrily fired back, "Dean, we got trapped in there and I almost went to my very first and very last birthday party."
"That's 'cause you're such a party pooper sometimes, Sammy."
Sam hoped his heated glare said more than shouting could, knew it did when Dean relented.
"Ok, I admit that didn't go down as smoothly as I wanted but this…" Dean swung his hand toward the house as if he were showing Sam a showcase he could win, "is the real deal Sam. It's just some run-of-the-mill pissed off spirits."
"Who want to kill each other …" Sam began and Alec finished with, "And anyone they perceive as the enemy. Like most definitely us."
"Come on," Dean chuckled. "You would think this was the first time we were tripping the light fantastic with some dead guys."
"Twenty four thousand causalities, Dean," Sam acidly pointed out, giving a bitter laugh with his next words. "That's a little more that just a few spirits at unrest."
"Casualties, Sam. Not deaths," Dean corrected.
"Right, cause we've never heard of people dying somewhere else and their spirits coming back to the spot in life that tormented them the most," Sam's tone dripped with sarcasm.
"Aren't you Mr.-the-glass-is-bone-dry," Dean baited.
Abruptly the air erupted with the sound of musket fire.
All three brothers instantly went motionless, strained to hear what they could not have possibly heard.
But a few moments later, the sound of more musket fire vibrated through the late afternoon sky.
"Please tell me that was part of a reenactment?" Alec tersely asked, crossing his fingers that a 'of course, silly' was headed his way. But the grim looks exchanged between his brothers told him that things weren't going to go that easy for them.
Attempting to appear unconcerned, Dean surmised with a humorless smile, "Guess they are starting the party early."
"Maybe you didn't notice, but that wasn't coming from inside the house, Dean," Sam sourly pointed out. "Fraley's field," he said at the same time as Dean, both simultaneously figuring out where the rifle fire was coming from. The place where the battle of Shiloh had began back in 1862.
With fear starting to get a good grip on him, Sam entreated his brother with a simple utterance of his name, "Dean."
"Ok, so this haunting might be happening on a bigger scale than we thought," Dean conceded. Raising his pointer finger, he added on positively, "But nobody has gotten killed outside the house…."
"That we know about," Sam sharply cut in.
"You two bring me to the nicest places," Alec sarcastically muttered. "Makes sloshing around a sewer with Max sound like a dream vacation."
Dean offered a smile to Alec that did nothing to settle either of his brothers' nerves. "Oh don't worry."
"Yeah, and why not?" Alec scoffed, couldn't wait to hear the good news.
"In Hebrew, Shiloh means place of peace," Dean revealed with a twist of his lips. Giving Alec a pat on the chest and slipping free of Sam's grip, he purposely stalked toward the farm house.
"Yeah, eternal peace wasn't what I had in mind for tonight," Alec grumbled under his breath but yelled to Dean's back. "Don't make me come in there after you."
"Yeah, yeah," Dean downplayed with a wave of his hand.
Turning to his sane brother, Alec asked, "Is it just me or does this plan suck?"
"Dean has had worse plans that worked," Sam acknowledged but there a noticeable lack of conviction in his tone.
"I'm not sure if that's a comfort," Alec resentfully shot back.
Blanching, Sam confessed, "Me either." Tightening his grip on his bag, he offered Alec a small smile, ordered "Be careful," before he followed in Dean's footsteps. Though he was relieved that Dean had seen reason and finally agreed that they both would enter the house, it didn't feel great leaving Alec behind, letting Alec outside to take care of any sentinels Manticore would position on the perimeter of the house. But it was still worlds better than Alec stepping into ghost central with them.
"You be careful too," Alec quietly ordered even though he knew Sam didn't hear him. But he had said his peace before, had told his big brothers how he would feel if they screwed up, left him standing out there playing sentry duty while they did something stupid like got themselves killed. Dean and Sam had to know that, a few thousand ghosts looking to torture them forever, that would be the least of their problems if they didn't come back to him.
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Stepping through the farm house doorway, Sam nearly ran into Dean, came up a millimeter short of knocking Dean over only by reaching out, steadying himself with a hand on the coiled muscles of his brother's shoulder. He was about to ask Dean what was wrong when his mouth went dry.
The house wasn't deserted, far from it.
Instead, every square inch was alive with a flurry of activity, offered a sensory overload of horrific smells, ghastly sights and soul decimating screams of agony. They were all there. Still there. The wounded, the dying were laying on the floor, on makeshift stretchers, on every available piece of furniture, blood coating their clothing, sputtering out of their mouths, dried to their skin in death. And the nurses and other women, they knelt by the wounded, closed the eyes of the dead, carried bowls of water and ripped strips of linen, shushed the screams as the doctors manhandled destroyed limbs, sewed up sword wounds, extracted bullets.
It was real…and yet, the figures occupying the house weren't corporeal, weren't quite all there, were translucent, as if only a shade of their bodies had remained. Neither Winchester had ever witnessed anything like it before.
As he stepped forward, Dean noticed that no one looked at him or watched his progress into the room. It was as he was the ghost instead of them. Turning around, he wanted, needed to see Sam, to be assured that he hadn't slipped alone into another universe but his attention was snagged instead by a soldier with a messenger bag. A soldier that was running for the door, was on a crash course with him. He tried to dodge left, to move out of the kid's way. He wasn't fast enough.
The soldier ran right through Dean and out the door, left a subzero chill coursing through the hunter in his wake.
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TBC
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A show of hands of the people who thought I could throw in a Civil War reference into this story? Well, after this twist, I'm hoping you are not removing this story from your alert setting, turning off your computers and heading off to go watch paint dry.
I will admit that I took major liberties with history. I don't know if there was a farm house at Shiloh. I certainly don't know if any residences were close enough to the battle to be used as a field hospital. But there was a civil war battle named Shiloh that took place a few miles from Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee.
Thanks as always to my reviewers and readers! I almost have the next part ready to go.
Have a great evening!