Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognise; the original concept of this story was inspired by 'To Hell & Back' by EventRider87, but I've added my own spin to things and have received EventRider87's permission to use their idea for this
Feedback: Much appreciated
The Corrupted Innocent
"Daddy?" the little girl- Joanna- asked, looking curiously at him. "Are you OK?"
"Daddy's just… got a lot on now," Dean said, looking at the girl while trying not to show how uncomfortable he was at this particular development.
He might think that family was important, but the idea that he'd have one of his own when he knew what the world was like…
His father had dragged him and Sam into this life because it was the only way to keep them safe, but it was one thing to take care of kids when you already had them and another matter to bring them into the world when you knew they'd be dealing with demons and monsters and everything in between.
The idea that he'd had a child in a world that literally gone to Hell…
"What's wrong?" Bela asked, her voice breaking his train of thought as he realised that she was staring at him in a concerned manner. "You seem so…"
Her voice trailed off as she looked more closely at him, eyes narrowing for a moment before she became visibly confused and turned to her daughter. "Go with Uncle Cas, Jo."
"Mommy?" the girl asked.
"Daddy and Mommy need to have a talk," Bela said, smiling warmly at the little girl. "Just dull grown-up stuff; ask Uncle Cas to read something to you."
"OK," the girl smiled, taking Castiel's hand and hurrying out of the hut. "C'mon, Unky Cas; I wanna read more of Percy!"
"…Percy?" Dean looked at Bela in surprise as the girl and the angel hurried into another hut.
"Percy Jackson," Bela replied briefly. "Gods on that level aren't a problem any more, so letting her read about them in novels never seemed like a problem… which proves that you're not Dean."
"I'm not?"
"Not… my Dean," Bela said, smiling awkwardly at him before she assumed a more serious expression. "What I want to know is what you are."
If it had been anyone else, Dean might have tried to bluff his way through this situation, but even if it hadn't happened to him yet, he couldn't lie to the mother of his child.
"I'm from the past."
"The past," Bela repeated, before giving him a brief smile. "So you're doing that again?"
"Marty McFly the other way around," Dean shrugged, wishing he felt as light about the matter as he sounded before he looked more curiously at her. "And as long as we're talking about time travel and family ties… Joanna?"
"Partly after your father, and partly after… well, after a friend," Bela said, her tone awkward. "It was… well, she gave a lot to the cause, so…"
"Gotcha," Dean said, refusing to consider the implications of Bela's avoidance; he could be fairly sure who the 'friend' was that she was talking about, but even if Bobby and Sam were almost certainly dead now, he was going to hope that anyone who wasn't here already was just somewhere else and/or presumed dead. "How did… well…?"
"You know what they say," Bela shrugged, giving him a small smile. "The only foolproof protection is abstinence, and we were never very good at that when we had the time."
"Right," Dean acknowledged, fighting down the urge to panic; after all his one-night stands, the idea that he could have had a child in the middle of the actual Apocalypse…
"We've kept her as safe as possible," Bela explained. "The moment she was born, Castiel used some of his remaining angelic influence to put the same sigils on her as he gave us; angels can't detect her, we've done our best to keep her secret from Lucifer's forces, and…"
"Anything that does see her gets put down before it can hurt her?"
"Precisely."
"So… she's safe," Dean smiled, looking thoughtfully at the door the little girl had gone through before another detail came to him. "What about… Grandma?"
"Dead."
Spinning around at the unfamiliar voice, Dean only slightly relaxed when he realised that it was just himself (He guessed it was true what everyone said; you always sounded really different to yourself compared to what you heard in your head).
"Dead?" he asked, focusing on what mattered. "What happened?"
"Sam," the older Dean answered grimly. "She tried to save him… didn't work out."
Dean wished he knew what to say in this situation. The notion that his grandmother had died for his brother was depressingly, but at the same time, he'd only know her for a year or so, and from his perspective it technically hadn't happened yet…
"How did it go?" Bela asked, looking anxiously at the older Dean.
"One got bitten," the older Dean explained bitterly, before turning back to Bela. "We've got work to do."
"Hold on; one got bitten?" Dean cut in. "Bitten by what?"
"Croats," his future self said bitterly. "Croatoans. One of them infected Yeager."
"You know that?"
"You get used to the signs after this long," the older Dean said grimly. "Didn't see the point troubling him about it when he didn't seem to know it himself, but…"
Dean wasn't sure if he was comfortable with the idea of himself being so nonchalant about killing a human, but he could appreciate the fact that at least he hadn't done it when his daughter might see it.
"By the way," he said, deciding to tackle his most pressing personal question before things got too serious, "Joanna?"
"After Dad and Jo," the future Dean clarified. "She's named after them, but it's actually spelt 'Johanna' on her birth certificate so she can feel like it's hers rather than one of theirs; spelt the same way as in Hunger Games, you know?"
"Don't think I've read that one…"
"He's from 2009, Dean; Catching Fire might not even have come out yet," Bela noted, smiling at his future self before looking back at Dean. "Johanna was a character in that series; she… well, she won a contest against twenty-three opponents where only one of them could get out alive by pretending to be weak and helpless so nobody would pay attention to her until they were down to the last few, and then she went on a killing spree."
"Ah," Dean noted, glancing at the door that his daughter had gone through with a thoughtful smile. "Well… don't approve of the killing-humans bit, but… suppose I can get behind that as a strategy… Makes a cool name, anyway."
"Yeah," his future self smiled, before his expression became grimmer. "And this is when that ends."
"What ends?"
"Hiding like this," the older him said firmly, reaching into his pocket to pull out the familiar form of the Colt as he looked grimly at his past self. "It ends tonight."
"How?" Dean asked.
"We found Lucifer."
"You actually found him?" Bela looked sceptically at her… Dean suddenly wondered what kind of relationship the two of them had by now. "What makes you think-?"
"Oh, it's almost certainly a goddamn trap, but that doesn't mean we can't turn it around and use it ourselves," Dean's future self said grimly. "Guy who gave us the locale took a while to talk, but we've been careful about taking this out, and there's no way for any of the smoky bastards to be sure we can still make bullets for this thing-"
"Wait; are you saying that they know we have that?" Dean cut in, looking sharply between himself and Bela, their subdued reactions all the confirmation he needed. "How the Hell'd that happen? We never bring that thing out unless we're sure we need to kill something; did we just-?"
The phone call he'd shared with Sam just before he took this jump into the future suddenly jumped to the front of his mind, along with the horrible implications of this world on top of everything he'd heard before coming here.
"He said yes?" he started incredulously at his future self.
"No idea why," the older man said firmly. "Maybe Sam thought he had some big plan, maybe Luci convinced him it wasn't goin' to be as bad as all this… whatever it was, Luci's been wearin' Sam to the prom since this mess started, and there's no way to get him out."
"You can't be serious!" Dean yelled, slamming his hand against the wall as he glared at his future self. "This is Sam we're talkin' about-"
"You think I don't know that!" the other Dean glared, walking up to stare his past self in the eye.
"Dean," Bela said, looking at them in a manner that made it clear she was addressing both of them, "you need to calm down."
The older Dean paused for a moment, staring at Bela with a pained expression, before he sighed and stepped back.
"Sorry," he said, looking back at his past self. "Believe me, I thought everything you're probably thinking when I first heard the news, but it's in him, it's not getting out, and we have to stop it for her."
"You're goin' to use your kid as an excuse-"
"She's half the reason I haven't just started torturin' people to vent how I feel about the state of the world right now; you really want to get into my motives at a time like this?" Dean's silence was all the response his future self needed to continue. "We need to kill Lucifer if this is ever goin' to stop… and the only other option we've got is you goin' back when Zach's finished with you and doin' what you can to change things."
"Change things… hold on, you mean Michael?" Dean looked incredulously at his other self. "You do get that-?"
"You think I want that? God, I get that the planet could be torched if those two duke it out, but it's half the planet gets vaped in that roundup or no planet at all, which is what we're going to be left with at this rate!"
"So why didn't you say 'yes' if you're that sure about it?"
"You think I didn't? Second I knew Sam had said 'yes' I was doin' my best to get Michael's attention, shoutin' 'yes' til I was blue in the face-"
"With conditions, naturally," Bela cut in.
"Conditions, sure, but it didn't matter what I did; they just weren't listenin' any more," the future Dean said, looking grimly at his past self. "It's too late for me, but for you-"
"There's another way," Dean said firmly.
"That's what I thought," the older Dean said, staring bitterly down at the ground. "I was cocky… never actually thought I'd lose-"
"You haven't lost as long as you're alive when something else is actively trying to kill you, Dean," Bela cut in, stepping forward to stand between the two Deans as she glared firmly at his future self. "And in case you're forgetting, there's a little girl back there who still sees you as her saviour. You've done everything you could do for her, and you've kept these people alive, so you don't get to say you've lost because you were up against the most powerful entity on the planet."
"And if you really thought you'd lost, you wouldn't even be trying to do this," Dean glared, indicating the Colt. "You got a plan?"
"We've found Lucifer's current set-up," Dean's future self nodded grimly. "It's right in the middle of a Croat hotzone, which means that we've got to get through a shitload of killer psychos and demons before we even get close to our target, so I'm going to need to get the main guys we've got left to make a big enough fuss at one end so that I can get at him the other way."
Looking at his future self, Dean wasn't sure how he should feel about the implications of that plan. Maybe his future self had some training that he just hadn't gone through yet, but right now that description sounded like he was basically going to use Castiel and any other fighters on his team as a distraction while he went after Lucifer.
"You sure about this?"
"It's the best idea we've had," Bela noted grimly.
"Then I'm going."
"You can't-"
"Zach sent me here for a reason, so I've got to believe that he ain't gonna let me get me end up dead," Dean explained. "And if this is how it's all gonna end… I want to see that."
Dean might be thrown by seeing himself from this angle from the outside, but he knew Bela well enough by this point to know that she didn't approve of the idea even as she knew that he wasn't going to be talked out of it. Riding into a battle with the devil himself was definitely one of the crazier things he'd ever done, but if this was going to be the future, Dean was going to get the other side of the picture while he was here.
If his brother was Lucifer's meatsuit, he wanted to be sure there wasn't some screwy master plan going on before he condemned Sam for good…
A few hours later, Dean wondered if his future self had ever seriously believed that this plan would work.
The drive to Lucifer's apparent base had been more than slightly awkward, considering that he'd been travelling with Castiel as the only other person in the 'strike team' who knew about him already- Bela staying behind to take care of Johanna- and the angel he'd known five years ago had become a drug-addled mess who only seemed to be in the fight because he had no idea what to do with himself after the loss of his powers. Dean had tried to focus on the fact that Cas was still willing to fight for them despite everything he'd lost as proof they were doing the right thing, but when he'd reached their destination and been stabbed in the neck with some kind of tranquiliser…
Seriously, how much of that drugged hippie bit was all an act?
He didn't know how long he'd been out of it, but when he woke up to see some of the 'strike team' running away from the building's front entrance, he'd barely given himself a moment to ascertain the situation before diving round the back of the house.
Front must have been the trap, and future-me probably told them to back off once it reached a certain point to save their asses, but if Luci's in Sam he'd have to know that we'd know that, which means…
Even in his worst nightmares, he'd never imagined that he'd see Sam breaking his own neck; the fact that the white suit made it clear that this wasn't Sam only made it slightly easier.
"Oh," Sam- Lucifer!- said, turning to look at him as though the sight of the man he'd just killed in two places at once was no big deal. "Hello, Dean; aren't you a surprise? You've come a long way to see this, haven't you?"
"Well, go ahead," Dean said, ignoring the thunder and lightning booming overhead as he stared at the thing using his brother as a puppet. "Kill me."
"Kill you?" Lucifer said, looking down at Dean's dead future self. "Don't you think that would be a little… redundant?"
Dean wasn't sure what made him feel more sick; that Sam was being used like this, or that Lucifer was being so damn nonchalant about the fact that he was talking to someone he'd just killed, as though time travel and everything was just another day at the goddamn office.
"I'm sorry," Lucifer said, and the bastard actually had the gall to sound like he meant it. "It must be painful, speaking to me in this… shape. But it had to be your brother. It had to be."
As Lucifer reached for his shoulder, Dean stepped back; if he was going to die at the hands of this fuck, he wasn't going to give the bastard the satisfaction of pretending to be friendly.
"You don't have to be afraid of me, Dean," Lucifer said, surprisingly nonchalant for what he was. "What do you think I'm going to do?"
"I don't know," Dean countered as Lucifer walked past him. "Maybe deep-fry the planet?"
"Why?" Lucifer asked, examining a rose in a manner that made Dean think of that Beauty and the Beast poster he'd seen when that film came out in the early nineties. "Why would I want to destroy this stunning thing? Beautiful in a trillion different ways. The last perfect handiwork of God."
Dean simply glared harshly at the fallen archangel; as far as he was concerned, if this guy wanted to show that he loved the planet, he shouldn't be planning to annihilate the dominant species because they weren't perfect.
"You ever hear the story of how I fell from grace?"
"Oh, good God, you're not gonna tell me a bedtime story, are you?" Dean said, falling back on his default sarcasm and praying Sam had enough influence in there to stop Lucifer killing him twice over in a few minutes. "My stomach's almost out of bile."
"You know why God cast me down?" Lucifer continued, showing no reaction to Dean's retort. "Because I loved him. More than anything. And then God created… you. The little... hairless apes. And then he asked all of us to bow down before you- to love you more than him. And I said, 'Father, I can't'. I said, 'These human beings are flawed, murderous'. And for that, God had Michael cast me into hell. Now, tell me, does the punishment fit the crime? Especially when I was right? Look at what six billion of you have done to this thing, and how many of you blame me for it."
Dean had never thought he could hate something more than he hated the kind of monster who just killed people for no other reason than that it liked killing people, but right now, he absolutely hated the angel in front of him when the guy had just clearly explained his chain of reasoning for his plans to destroy humanity.
Maybe the human race wasn't perfect, but if his experience with Bela over the past year had taught him anything, it was that nobody deserved to be thrown under the bus to that extent without at least giving them a chance.
Right now, looking at Lucifer, all he saw was a nigh-omnipotent idiot who was so blinded by prejudice that he couldn't see why he was wrong, or even bother to look for reasons why he might not have been right.
"You're not fooling me, you know," he said, deciding to keep it simple while fighting the urge to cry at seeing what Sam had become. "All this 'sympathy-for-the-devil' crap? I know what you are."
"What am I?" Lucifer asked, apparently genuinely curious.
"Just a bigger version of the kind of evil shit I've been hunting all my life," Dean said firmly. "An ugly, evil, belly-to-the-ground, supernatural piece of crap. The only difference between them and you is the size of your ego."
"And you are innocent of that sin?" Lucifer asked. "Believing that I wouldn't know about Johanna?"
Dean's blood ran cold at that statement.
"You even dare-!" he began, walking up towards the archangel before he could realise what he was doing.
"Now why should I do that?" Lucifer smiled, the nonchalance bringing Dean to a halt. "After all, most of humanity might have been dealt with, but we have not truly waged the Apocalypse until I face Michael; if my brother is no longer interested in you as a vessel… it stands to reason that his new true vessel will emerge later in your bloodline."
If Dean's blood had been cold earlier, it was virtually ice now.
Lucifer planned to keep his daughter alive for breeding stock?
"I like you, Dean," Lucifer gave him a brief grin. "I get what the other angels see in you. Goodbye. We'll meet again soon."
"You know," Dean said resolutely, as Lucifer turned away from him, "the second I get the chance, I am going to find a way to kill you, and I'll never stop."
"I know you won't," Lucifer said, actually daring to look sorry as he turned back to Dean. "I know you won't say yes to Michael, either. And I know you won't kill Sam. Whatever you do, you will always end up here. Whatever choices you make, whatever details you alter, we will always end up… here. I win. So, I win."
"You're wrong," Dean said resolutely.
As Lucifer simply smiled at him with a nonchalant comment that he'd see Dean in five years, Dean turned around to see Zachariach standing behind him, the older-looking angel raising his fingers to Dean's forehead-
After reeling against the sink, once again hating the way that teleportation shit made him feel, Dean turned his attention back to his angelic visitor, fighting down the urge to vomit.
"Well," he said firmly, praying he wouldn't ruin the moment by vomiting even if the bastard deserved it, "if it isn't the Ghost of Christmas Screw you."
"Enough," Zachariah said. "Dean, enough. You saw it, right? You saw what happens. You're the only person who can prove the devil wrong. Just say yes."
"How do I know that this whole thing isn't one of your tricks?" Dean countered, deciding to focus on the essential questions. "Some angel hocus-pocus?"
"The time for tricks is over," the bald angel countered. "Give yourself to Michael. Say yes and we can strike. Before Lucifer gets to Sam. Before billions die."
Phrased that way, on top of everything he'd just seen, it almost sounded good; maybe if he said 'Yes' to Michael, if he understood what Cas had told him about archangels and the more complicated rules about their vessels, he could take Lucifer out of the picture before he got to his 'True Vessel' while he was still low on juice…
These guys want the apocalypse as it's written; if they take me, Mike's almost certainly goin' to keep me in reserve until Luci's ready to fight, and then we're still going to take a shitload of fire before it's all over, and that's assuming the 'good' archangel wins it in the end…
But there was also Johanna to consider.
Time-travel had never been a favourite genre of Dean's, but he'd picked up enough from some of Sam's favourite shows back when they could spare the time to watch stuff to understand that history was a tricky thing to tamper with.
He'd put his own life at risk, but if he gave into this bastard's schemes now, his daughter would never be born.
If he fought as himself… maybe the odds weren't great, but there had to be a chance…
"Nah."
"Nah?" Zachariah repeated incredulously (and hearing the prick in a suit say something like that was almost worth it). "You telling me you haven't learned your lesson?"
"Oh, I've learned a lesson," Dean confirmed, staring firmly back at his enemy. "Just not the one you wanted to teach."
"Well, I'll just have to teach it again!" Zachariah practically growled. "Because I got you now, boy, and I'm never letting you-"
Hit with another sense of teleportation disorientation, Dean found himself standing on the side of a road, Castiel looking at him
"That's pretty nice timing, Cas," Dean grinned at his friend, suddenly remembering their earlier talk about Cas bringing him over so that they could plan their next move once he'd had some sleep.
"We had an appointment," the angel said in his familiar direct manner, such a change from the near-hippy in the future who seemed unwilling to focus on anything more than where he was going to get laid.
"Don't ever change," Dean said firmly.
"How did Zachariah find you?"
"Long story," Dean said, reaching into his pocket as he spoke. "Let's just stay away from Jehovah's Witnesses from now on, OK?"
"What are you doing?" Cas asked as Dean pulled out his phone.
"Something I should have done in the first place," Dean said, already planning his next move; he wasn't sure how much of it he was going to share with his brother, but if he could just-
"What is this?" Castiel said before Dean could start dialling, holding out a crumpled piece of paper that had fallen out of his pocket. Dean was about to make a pithy comeback when the scent of the paper hit his nostrils, accompanied by a distinctive B written on a visible corner, and the phone was immediately forgotten as he grabbed the note and unfolded it, suddenly recalling that last hug he'd received from Bela before he joined Castiel in heading for that last car.
WHEN YOU'RE HOME
ENTER FOR JOHANNA
20 NOVEMBER
Dean couldn't be sure what that meant, but based on his daughter's age and Bela's interesting sense of humour, he had an idea or two…
AN: Sorry I skipped Dean's talk with FutureCas and his last talk with his future self, but I decided that, with Johanna giving Dean something to be human for, there was less merit in showing just how far he's fallen in this future and more merit in showing his confrontation with Lucifer, as well as sowing the seeds for certain future events
