A/N: (wow sorry this took so long. i sort of forgot i was only halfway through uploading this one T_T)

Dean kept a tight hold on the knife in his pocket, hand clenching and unclenching around the hilt as he paced down the mostly empty street. It wouldn't do him a whole lot of good on the off-chance they did run into the Djinn, which they were hoping to avoid, but the familiar texture of the grip helped soothe his nerves anyway.

He shouldn't have been nervous. This was a fairly standard hunt, if he didn't account for the time limit on the search and rescue aspect of it, just like dozens of others he had gone on in the past. They were gonna track down the Djinn, tussle with it for a few minutes, gank the sonofabitch, get Chris back to his daughter, and be on their way to the next case in a day or two. No reason whatsoever for him to feel so jumpy and unsettled.

The clatter of a rock skidding across pavement echoed loudly off the concrete and corrugated steel all around them and Dean turned to see Stiles grimacing down at his own foot.

"Sorry," the kid whispered. "It's fine. Keep going."

Dean faced forward again with a growl of frustration. He was uncomfortably aware of it when Stiles sped up to walk alongside him, almost close enough for their arms to brush together. Stiles' hands were shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans, which was not smart when the only weapon he had on him was tucked into the back of his belt where he wouldn't be able to reach it quickly. He was staring around the dingy walkway with all the attention of a goldfish. Honestly, he looked half a second away from whistling the Jeopardy theme song to himself out of boredom.

And he kept scuffing his feet along the ground with every other step. The shushing noise was seriously grating on Dean's last nerve.

"I'm twenty, by the way," Stiles said.

"What?" Dean said, thrown by the abruptness of that completely random statement.

"My age," Stiles said. "You asked last night how old I was. It was probably rhetorical, but I figured I'd give you a real answer anyway. I'm twenty, almost twenty-one."

"Good for you," Dean grunted, hoping that would be standoffish enough to put an end to the conversation for a while.

He didn't care how old Stiles was. That he could still hear Stiles' voice in his head saying "old enough not to be jailbait, if that's what you mean" was irrelevant because that hadn't been what he had meant. Really, that information meant nothing to him at all and Stiles was delusional for thinking it might.

They rounded the corner of an old industrial building and there was the first of their warehouses. The huge metal doors were rusted and warped so that, even closed and padlocked, there was still at least a considerable gap between them where the bottom edge. Most of the windows were boarded up and the whole place looked suitably abandoned, but they weren't here to accept that at face value.

Dean slid his knife out of his pocket, letting it settle at his side in a ready stance. He led the way around the building, giving it a wide berth and sticking to the shadows as best he could. There was something very strange about doing this kind of skulking in the middle of the day instead of under cover of night, but he could make do. He was trying to get a look in one of the more open windows when Stiles' voice sounded right in his ear, just as close as that morning in the car.

"So how about you, old man?"

Dean very nearly rammed his head back into Stiles' face just on instinct. Instead he stumbled forward a bit, out of Stiles' reach, and turned back to scowl at him.

"Dude, you sneak up on me like that again and you're gonna get stabbed," he hissed, brandishing the knife in his hand, the one that could've very easily found its way into Stiles' something or other if Dean's startle reflex had been even slightly less refined than it was. "And I'm not old. "

Stiles just shrugged, apparently unaware of or unconcerned by how close he had just come to death.

"I don't know, dude," he drawled. "You're giving off an old man vibe right about now. Like you're gonna call me a hooligan and tell me to get off your lawn."

"That's because you're an obnoxious kid," Dean said shortly. "And I'm twenty-seven. Not that it matters."

"See, now was that so hard?" Stiles asked, raising both eyebrows at him in a way that was wholly patronizing. "Achievement unlocked: two-way conversation. Congrats, you're making progress towards being a social creature like the rest of us."

"Do you ever shut up?" Dean snapped at him. "We've got a job to do here, you know. It would be nice if you could maybe take it seriously for just a few minutes."

Stiles' expression soured a bit, that ever present half-grin of his finally collapsing into something that almost approached a frown. Dean expected him to argue, to snark back or defend himself somehow, but he just held out a hand for Dean to lead the way.

He did, creeping forward down the pathway between the two buildings, but the easy capitulation threw him off. He had only known Stiles for less than two days, and already the guy not arguing with him felt like missing a step going down stairs. Maybe that particular jibe, accusing him of not caring about what they were doing, had hit a nerve or something. He'd almost looked a bit hurt by it, even. That thought probably shouldn't have made Dean feel guilty, but it sort of did.

If he hadn't been so distracted by his own thoughts, he probably would've seen it coming.

The Djinn—or at least, the form the Djinn was in right now—was a teenage boy, on the small side of average, dressed inconspicuously in jeans and a graphic t-shirt. The only things that marked him as not human were the glowing eyes and the blue tattoos lit up on his skin.

He came bursting out of one of the warehouse's windows, sending bits of broken wood flying in all directions, and crashed right into Dean. They both went sprawling across the pavement and all the air in Dean's lungs left him in a painful rush. He rolled away, coming to his feet gasping and coughing as he heard Stiles call his name. If he'd had the breath, Dean would have yelled at him to run the other way, to call Sam and Allison, to get out of dodge while he could.

He didn't have the chance anyway. The Djinn was there again, pouncing on him with hands outstretched, reaching for any bare skin. Dean threw up an arm, letting the Djinn latch onto something covered in layers of clothing instead of his neck. He let himself be pushed until his back hit a wall, then braced his foot against the solid surface to get the leverage he needed. With a heave, he sent the Djinn stumbling backwards, away from him.

Away from him, but towards Stiles.

Stiles ducked as the Djinn redirected its attention to the closer target, sliding under the boy's tattooed arm to come up behind him. He kicked out at the back of the Djinn's knees. The Djinn went to the ground and came back snarling, lunging up to wrap arms around Stiles' legs and take him down.

"Stiles!"

Dean scrambled for his knife, lost during the initial attack, and snatched it up from underneath half a rotted two-by-four. He didn't know how much good it would really do without the lamb's blood, but it was still silver and that had to mean something. Even if it just stung the damn thing, that would still be better than nothing and it would give them some time to run. Hopefully.

The Djinn had Stiles pinned, struggling to reach skin. But Stiles had a longer arm span than the boyish form on top of him and he had both hands planted firmly on the Djinn's shoulders, barely holding the snarling thing at bay.

Dean brought the knife down hard, imbedding it high in the creature's back, and the boy screamed in pain. There was a moment where Dean almost allowed himself to think he had won, that the silver knife had been enough on its own and they were both gonna get out of this unscathed, and then he was slamming into concrete hard enough to stun him and leave him breathless again.

A hand hovered over his face, luminescent blue like the wide eyes that stared down at him above a grinning mouth, but Dean's head was spinning and his limbs weren't quite responding the way he needed them to. He spared a second to hope that Stiles was smart enough to save himself before the hand was coming down.

It didn't connect.

Before the Djinn could touch him, another hand came down, this one pale and plain, to land on the top of the boy's head. Immediately the Djinn stiffened like an electric current had gone through him. His mouth opened in a silent cry, body twitching violently as the glow of his eyes grew brighter and brighter until Dean had to close his. A smell like ozone and charcoal hit his nose and then the weight of the body on top of him was falling away.

When Dean opened his eyes again, Stiles was standing over him, hand outstretched, and the Djinn was laid out on the pavement, still and limp and smoking faintly.

Dean stared, uncomprehending. Stiles stared back.

Finally, Stiles pulled his phone out of his back pocket, pushed a few buttons, and brought it to his ear.

"Hey, Alli," he said, sounding remarkably composed when Dean sort of felt like the whole world had turned sideways and decided to stay that way for a while. "We had a bit of a situation. We're fine; it's handled. But we're gonna have to have a conversation. I think I've got some things to explain."

Stiles was pacing, which was not unusual for him in stressful situations. And having Sam and Dean Winchester, hunters extraordinaire, both staring at him like this definitely qualified as stressful.

They were back at the motel, all four of them in Stiles' and Allison's room. Chris hadn't been in the warehouse. Stiles and Dean had searched the place from top to bottom in the time it took for the others to get to them, but there had been no evidence of Chris or any of the other victims having been kept there in the recent past, so they were forced into an uncomfortable conclusion: there was more than one Djinn, and the other one was keeping Chris at another location.

At least they now had one less Djinn to worry about. That was a good thing, even if in killing it Stiles had outed himself for what he was.

"A spark?" Dean repeated flatly, his face hard to read. He had been like that ever since the attack, closed off in a way that Stiles didn't like at all. Not just because it made it hard for Stiles to get a read on what he was thinking and therefore how much danger he might be in, but also because it just wasn't right on him. Dean was an expressive person; seeing him shut down like that made something low in Stiles' belly squirm miserably.

"Yeah," Stiles said. It wasn't like he could deny it now, even if he had wanted to, not with what Dean had witnessed.

He didn't have anything else to say to appease them anyway. He had already given them the basic rundown of what a spark was, what it could do. They had kept quiet through his explanation, the brothers listening with grim focus and Allison sharpening her ring daggers in the far corner of the room, watching them closely for any sign that they had come to the conclusion that Stiles was something they needed to hunt.

"So let me get this straight," Dean said slowly. "You used magic to fry the Djinn's brain?"

"Not directly, not really." Stiles ran a hand through his hair, pulling a bit as he searched for the right words to convey exactly what he had done. "I used magic to put up a kind of shield between the Djinn's brain and the outside world. I stopped his hallucinatory magic from going anywhere and, in doing so, I turned it back on him. And it built up to the point where he sort of overloaded. That's what fried him."

"Right, right," Dean said, nodding. "And how is that not witchcraft?"

"No!" Stiles said immediately. "No, it's not—I mean, it's magic, but it's not—I'm not a witch! I'm a spark; it's different."

Witches made demon deals and appealed to higher, darker powers to grant them their abilities. Witches tended to go the way of hurting people for their own selfish gain. Witches usually ended up getting their asses killed, either by the demonic masters they inevitably displeased or by hunters protecting innocents. Stiles wasn't interested in any of that, especially the last bit with the being killed by the two very capable and very determined hunters in the room with him right now.

This situation here was why he hadn't wanted them to know about his powers at all. He liked the Winchesters, he really did, and on most levels he thought he might even trust them, but this was something else entirely. He'd really intended to go this whole trip without tipping his hand, ideally only using magic when absolutely necessary and only when it was just him and Allison.

But then Dean had been in danger. And with Dean in danger, keeping the secret hadn't seemed so important anymore.

Now Dean was tense and hostile, openly mistrustful even though Stiles had saved his life, just because he'd used magic to do it. Stiles didn't regret it, of course, but Dean's reaction had him hunching his shoulders and wrapping his arms defensively around his stomach, unable to make eye contact.

"Witch, spark, it's the same thing!" Dean scoffed.

Stiles opened his mouth to argue, but Sam beat him to it.

"I don't think so," he said, his careful tone cutting his brother's dismissiveness off at the knees.

"What do you mean, you don't think so?" Dean asked incredulously. "You believe him on this?"

"The term 'spark' sounds really familiar," Sam said, tapping a thumb on his knee in an uneven rhythm as he thought. "Yeah. Yeah, it was in one of Bobby's books."

"Lots of things are in Bobby's books, Sam. That don't mean they're not dangerous," Dean argued and Stiles bit his tongue to keep from protesting that he wasn't a thing, a creature, a monster they had to fight. He was almost their friend, or at least he had hoped to be.

"Sparks weren't categorized with witches, though," Sam told him, picking up speed and confidence the longer he thought about it. "The book I looked through seemed to think they were more along the lines of psychics, like Missouri. Their brand of magic is more like psychic power brought into the physical world by force of will."

"Belief," Stiles put in, drawing both their attention back to him. "It's all about belief. If I believe in something hard enough—within reason—I can make it true. That's all my power is when it comes right down to it."

Dean still didn't look convinced, but the skepticism had cleared from Sam's face.

"Your tattoos," Sam said. "Do those have anything to do with your...your spark?"

"Some of them do, yeah," Stiles admitted, fiddling with the hem of his shirt, tugging it down more securely in a fit of self-consciousness. "They help channel it, control it, enhance it when necessary. I doubt I could've done what I did earlier without them."

It had taken him weeks to have the full piece inked, and months before that to plan it out to his own satisfaction. He had designed the whole thing himself, with some input from Deaton and Lydia and Noshiko, and a little help on the artistry aspect from Derek because he wanted it to be as visually pleasing as it was useful if it was going to be on his skin for the rest of his life.

It might have taken him egregious overuse of his anti-anxiety medication to get him through the actual tattooing process without losing consciousness, but the end result had definitely been worth it. The minute the last line had been put in place, Stiles had felt more settled than he had in years. The carefully chosen symbols he'd covered himself with had given him a kind of mastery over himself and his abilities that he would never have dreamed of when he'd first been dragged into the whole supernatural mess. He still had a lot to learn; he wasn't afraid to admit that, but he could also admit that he was pretty damn powerful as he was.

That probably wasn't something he needed to bring up just now, though. Not when Dean was still looking like he might bolt if Stiles made any sudden movements.

Feeling suddenly exhausted, Stiles ran both hands over his face.

"Look," he sighed. "If you guys aren't gonna put me down on the spot, then we've got other things to do. Chris is still depending on us."

He didn't say that they were running out of time, but they all heard it anyway. It was enough to get them moving again and the four of them gathered around the table to plan out their next move. If Dean stayed as far away from him as he possibly could, Stiles tried not to let it distract him. There were more important things for him to worry about than how much the loss of Dean's trust stung.