TITLE: Practical Magic and Other Lies that People Tell

AUTHOR: Mari

SPOILERS: Through 'Devil's Trap' for SPN and 'Kill Billie Vol. 2' for Charmed. AU for both shows afterwards so, yes, Phoebe and Paige are still dead and Piper is the only Charmed One left standing.

PAIRING: Mostly gen, though the heavy amounts of Dean/Piper subtext are very much intentional.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I'm not really a Charmed writer, and I will readily admit that my knowledge of canon is spotty. Mostly I watched the last season and then caught up as frantically as I could through Netflix and reruns. As Charmed couldn't seem to keep its own canon straight a lot of the time, especially in the final seasons, I resorted to just throwing my hands up in the air and going with the most palatable option nine times out of ten. As such, if you notice canon errors on the Charmed side (except in response to Wyatt's ever-growing retinue of powers, where it's deliberate), please feel free to bring them to my attention and over concrit in general.

Part One

Dean woke up with a pounding head, several broken bones on his right side, and the knowledge that he was now both an orphan and an only child.

After that, realizing that he was handcuffed to his hospital bed was almost anticlimactic.

---

Suspected murderers were not supposed to come back from the dead, Dean learned when he was finally weaned off of the painkillers enough to appreciate the handcuff situation and the fact that he had tubes running out of more orifices than he cared to think about. It caused quite a stir when they managed it. Dean had been carrying so many sets of fake identification with him that, as he had been brought to the hospital from the scene of a probable crime, his prints had finally been run just to see what would happen.

It would be a sad day for the universe when it finally ran out of ways to fuck him over, Dean thought. He tugged restlessly at the chain on his handcuff as yet another cop-he had lost track of how many he had already seen, and he strongly suspected that there were still more while he was unconscious-sat by his bedside and peppered him with the same questions that he had been hearing for days. Who is he? Where is he from? How is it possible that his photo and fingerprints match those of a killer buried in a pauper's grave hundreds of miles away?

'Make this make sense to me,' the cops eyes told him. 'We're not sure what we can hold you on, not really, but by God we'll keep inventing things until you show us how to set the world right again.' He didn't seem like a bad man, or a cruel one. He probably went to his kids' Little League games, volunteered at his church, and drank too much beer on the weekends. Dean almost felt sorry for him.

Almost. Dean's father and brother were dead, and it turned out that it was a hard old world all around. He was not in the mood to make it easy on anyone else just yet.

Dean continued to rattle at the chain on the handcuffs, wishing to God that his other arm was not encased in plaster up to the shoulder and that he could hit the button that discharged more morphine. His knitting bones were an agony that began with his ribs and spread outwards in a slowly-growing nova. He played dumb, sticking to the ID that was going to send up the least number of red flags in the checks that the cops have doubtless run on all of them by now and doing everything that he could to disavow the rest with good ol' boy charm. It worked about as well on this cop as it had on all of his buddies before him.

When the nurse finally arrived to give him his medication for the pain, it was all that Dean could do not to leap up from the bed and kiss her. "Angie," he declared broadly as he watched her inject the precious morphine into his IV, "I always knew that you were my favorite."

She said, "My name is Beth."

Dean almost thought that it would easier if he were to dream whenever the medication took him under, but he didn't.

---

When Beth was late with one of his miracle shots two days later, causing Dean to tell the latest in a long line of detectives where he could shove his badge if he was feeling so inclined, the police decided that the combination of the fake IDs and the fact that Dean was being less than cooperative were enough to keep him in custody, after all. Dean heard whispers of the body of his imposter being exhumed and still looking exactly like him, so that the police cannot even draw comfort from a bait and switch.

This was the first time in his life that Dean has ever remained in the hospital for the full amount of time recommended by his doctors, and without even having to use a scammed credit card in order to pay for it. This almost made Dean feel bad for what happened next.

Most of his right arm was still encased in plaster from the hospital and towards the police car waiting outside. There was a thunking noise as Dean swung it around and into the face of the officer on his right; the cracking sound that follows is that of the man's nose breaking. Bones that had hardly even begun to heal were jarred more than he liked and Dean gritted his teeth hard, thought for a moment that he tasted enamel on his tongue, but it was a pale shadow of what he had felt immediately after waking up. The second man was lying unconscious on the ground before he even had time to draw his gun.

Dean wondered if the fact that he did not kill the cop even though he was supposed to be a murderer would earn him any points. Probably not.

He had no car, no money, and none of his weaponry or IDs, so Dean stole a car and headed for the only place that he could think of. He didn't have a home, but he still had somewhere that would take him in. Dean was not sure if it was this realization or the fact that he was separated from Beth and her gifts too soon, but he had to pull the car over to the side of the road and be sick more than once.

Missouri was waiting for him on her front porch when Dean pulled the third in a string of stolen vehicles to a halt in front of her house and cut the engine. He exited cautiously, half from pain and half because he was not sure what kind of welcome he could really expect. When Missouri instead hugged him hard enough to make his cracked ribs throb, Dean felt as if all of the screws in his body had been simultaneously loosened by a half-turn. He leaned against her, lowering his face against her hair for a moment, and sighed.

"Oh, sugar," Missouri said, rubbing small circles against his back. "Oh, sweetheart, I am so sorry." For a moment, her pity was so strong that it cut, and it was all that Dean could not to break contact and step away from her. A second later, he realized that she probably felt the both of them die the very second that it happened.

"Not exactly, but near enough," Missouri said, leaning back after giving his injured arm a final, affectionate squeeze that he couldn't feel through the plaster. Then she glanced over his shoulder, and her eyes narrowed. Dean received a ringing smack to the back of his head as she exclaimed, "Boy, get that car out of here, do you think that I need the law brought down on my head?"

---

Once Dean had taken the stolen car far enough away to meet with her satisfaction and returned again, Missouri made him coffee, saying, "I knew as soon as I felt you coming that the two of us were going to be in for a long night." She also set out a sandwich for him and a bottle of aspirin, the cap already pulled off so that he would not have to struggle in order to manage it one-handed.

Dean had not thought that he could possibly be hungry ever again, but at the mere sight of food that did not belong to the gelatin family or come served on a cheap plastic tray, his appetite returned with a vengeance. Dean had the sandwich devoured within four ravenous bites, saying, "Oh, my God, you don't know how bad hospital food is until you don't have to eat it any longer. It's like breaking out of the Matrix."

"Don't talk with your mouth full, I didn't make it for you so that you could spray crumbs all over my table," Missouri answered immediately. She had taken a seat across from dean and was not eating herself, only cradling a cup of coffee between her palms. "And while we're here, I'm flattered that you came to see me, but think we both know that it's not just because you enjoy my company."

Dean shook his head and reached for the aspirin. He took four of them along with a swallow of coffee hot enough to burn the roof of his mouth, ignoring Missouri's arched eyebrow as she noted the amount, before he said, "You said that you could feel it when Dad and Sam died?"

"I said near enough." Missouri has by now given up any pretense of drinking her coffee and was sitting with her hands folded in front of her cup, watching Dean intently. The idea that she might know that he was going to say even before he did was not one of the comforting ones that Dean had ever had.

"No," Missouri said softly in response, earning herself a weary look. "It doesn't work quite like that. But then, I don't exactly need any kind of special gifts in order to know what you're going to ask me, do I?"

"My father came to you once," Dean said, "because he was looking for the truth."

"He did," Missouri confirmed, and sighed. "You know, even when he was a baby, I could see that Sam and your daddy were going to butt heads. Cut from the very same cookie-cutter, those two, and made of stubborn than they were anything else. You were always your mother's child." Off of Dean's look, she added, "No, I never met her. I saw her through your daddy's mind, and through yours the one time that he brought you and Sam to see me. Bet you don't remember that, do you? But Mary would have moved heaven and earth to protect her family."

"Hate to interrupt the stroll down memory lane," Dean broke in brusquely. He noticed that he was clenching Missouri's coffee cup so tightly that he was in danger of shattering it and sending shards of china flying all over the table. Missouri saw, but for once she did not scold him. "But I don't have a whole lot of family left to protect."

Missouri sighed from somewhere deep enough within her chest to sound as if it hurt her. "You're daddy was a damned good man," she said, "and I'm not about to tell you any differently, but you listen to me, Dean, and you listen to me good. For your own sake, you just keep right on being your mother's child for as long as you can manage." When Dean only continued to look at her, she sighed and said, "It'll head west, for the coast. There's something big that's been building up steam down there for months, and it's just now getting ready to boil over."

"Thank you." Dean nodded stiffly and then stared down at the remaining coffee in his cup, now tepid and unappetizing. He wondered if all of his emotions were being broadcast as loudly as he felt they must be. The dim even within his own head was so strong that he could barely force his thoughts to remain in a straight line.

"Like an open wound," Missouri answered for him. Dean really wished that she would stop doing that. "I'm not going looking for it-what kind of manners do you think that I have? I don't have to. You're telling everyone with even the slightest bit of the sight everything that they want to know." Missouri had long since finished off her own coffee while Dean was toying with his. She pushed the cup away from herself as she leaned back in her chair and stared at Dean through solemn, concerned eyes. "You need to put a bandage over that. Lord knows I'm not telling you to shut it off entirely, because I don't think that would be good for you even if you could, but if you walk out onto a battlefield on the verge of falling apart like you are right now, then you are going to get eaten alive. Yours is not the first family that this demon has taken, and it's not going to be the last-"

"Yes it is," Dean promised her. He might have been his mother's son, but he was pretty sure that it was his father's voice that came rolling out of his mouth.

"Then you had better get yourself ready," Missouri told him, "because right now you are not."

End Part One