Disclaimer: I don't own the rights to Supernatural or Doctor Who
...
"I don't like it," Dean said as he stared down at the big, black . . . thing. "What is it?"
Vanessa, standing beside Dean, gave a great shudder. "I don't know," she said. "But he says it's important."
Dean glanced at the Doctor, whose mouth was pressed into such a thin line that it might just disappear. He decided not to ask who "he" was in case the answer was just as awful as the face the Doctor was making. Instead, he pulled on his jacket and straightened his shoulders, taking a step toward the ship.
"Well," he said with false cheer in his voice, "I've always been pretty good at putting things back together. I could take a—"
He stopped short when the Doctor grabbed him by his jacket and yanked him hard away from the ship. The Doctor pulled so hard that Dean felt the pressure around his neck cut off his words.
"Hey!" Dean protested, but the look on the Doctor's face stopped him from saying anything else.
Not because the Doctor looked angry, of course. But because the Doctor looked scared.
It wasn't something Dean was used to. He'd faced ghosts and Cybermen and everything in between with the Doctor, and the only thing he'd ever seen from the Doctor was almost childlike wonder and glee. There had been the Terror Trap, of course, but that was supposed to be scary.
Dean saw that the Doctor was looking somewhere beyond him, so he spun around.
There it was.
Dean had never seen a Dalek before, and if he was being honest, this thing definitely didn't look anything like what he'd imagined. The way the Doctor talked about them, he was imagining something straight out of a horror movie—the kind that scared even a hardened hunter like him.
But this thing?
It looked like someone had taken a trash can and put a whole lot of circles on it, then stuck a plunger on the end. And it had one long eye thing sticking out of its face, which couldn't be all that good at detection and had to be a weakness. Not to mention the fact that it didn't seem to have any legs.
And this was the thing the Doctor was so scared of?
Still, he could practically feel the waves of terror coming from the Doctor nearby, so Dean backed up a bit, away from the trash can thingy. He glanced over at the Doctor and saw that the scared look had solidified into a hateful stare that could have cut through the very metal that Dalek was made out of.
With one last look at the Doctor, Dean cleared his throat and gave the Dalek a half-hearted wave. "Hey there," he said, grinning like he was introducing himself to a hot chick. "I'm Dean."
The Dalek just ignored him. Its eyestalk seemed not to move. It didn't say anything.
Dean wondered if it could talk, or if it communicated telepathically. The way the Doctor was staring at it, he wouldn't be surprised if they were having a little mental war over there that Dean couldn't help with.
The silence seemed to last for an eternity, even though Dean knew it wasn't actually all that long, before, at last, the Dalek said, "Doc-tor."
Dean blinked in surprise and looked over to the Doctor and was relieved to see that the Doctor looked just as startled.
The Dalek sounded . . . off. Like it was having a hard time stringing two syllables together just to make the Doctor's name. It sounded . . . hurt.
That was just Dean's guess, though. It was hard to tell anything when the Dalek was completely encased in metal like that. If it was bleeding or dying or something, how would they even know?
Sure, the metal was all scuffed up and it looked like it was missing nearly half the circle things that it should have had, but still, that was the shielding. What was the inside like?
The Doctor took a step forward, putting his glasses back on. "Caan," he said, his tone conversational and hardly betraying the anger that Dean could practically see radiating from his friend. "You've been busy, I see."
"I have . . . been in-jured." It sounded like every word was an effort. The little eyestalk even swiveled pathetically. Dean would almost have felt sorry for it if he didn't know better.
"Yes, but doing what?" the Doctor asked quietly. He began to move, circling the Dalek, peering at it closely. "If I didn't know better, I'd say some of these were teeth marks."
The Dalek just swiveled some more. "You. Will. Assist."
The Doctor snorted, taking off his glasses and sticking them in his side pocket. "That's not going to happen," he said, and there was no mistaking the malicious grin lingering on his face. "You've really done a number on yourself, Caan."
"You. Will. Assist."
The Doctor frowned, then leaned back, reaching out to signal for Dean to step a little further away from the Dalek. "I think not," he said. He almost sounded gleeful when he added, "You're dying."
Dean stared at his friend in surprise. This wasn't the Doctor he knew. This was someone else entirely.
Yeah, sure, he knew that the Doctor was capable of some dark stuff, but it had always been in his future. This Doctor, Dean's Doctor—he didn't let people die, even if they were ghosts or something else awful. This Doctor had Rose, had Martha, had Donna. This Doctor was as unforgiving of violence as he was in love with Rose.
And there he stood, eye-to-eyestalk with a dying creature, and he looked happy about it.
"Doctor," Dean said, not sure what he would say after that but quite certain that he had to say something. He stepped forward, and the Doctor threw out his hand.
"Don't get any closer," the Doctor said.
But it was too late. Dean felt something lurch in the pit of his stomach, and before he had time to register anything else, he was surrounded by complete and total darkness.
…
Sam had just put the Impala in park alongside the car they'd seen Dean and the Doctor be driven away in when he started to hear it.
Barking.
Only it wasn't quite like barking he'd ever heard. This seemed to reverberate throughout his entire skull, and his ears rang with the sound of it.
"Did you hear that?" he asked Martha suddenly.
Martha cocked her head to the side, then, seeming to hear nothing, turned back to Sam. "Hear what?"
At first, Sam didn't understand how Martha couldn't hear what he was hearing. The barking was so loud that he could hear it echoing from almost every direction, and it seemed to be getting closer. Something in the sound of it made his blood run cold, which was no small feat, considering what he and his brother did for a living.
"Sam?" Martha asked quietly, reaching out to put her hand on his arm.
Sam jumped at the contact, surprising even himself with how much the simple gesture startled him. He stared down at her hand, breathing deeply, trying to understand what was happening to him.
"Can't you hear it?" he asked.
He knew, of course, what was going on. But he refused to believe it.
There was absolutely no real reason for him to be hearing hellhounds.
...
A/N: Imagine super dramatic cliffhanger music playing right now. I've been psyched about this episode for a loooong time.
