Disclaimer: I don't own SPN.
I wasn't sure about this chapter, since it's just a recap of a canon case, but there is some Destiel in here and the next one so it's progress.
Thanks to Shannonisabanana, L. Thestrup, Dragonsrule18 and Skyla Andrews for your reviews :)
"So, what are we looking at again?" Sam says as they pull up outside the sheriff station. In response, Dean reaches into the back seat to grab a newspaper, which he hands to Sam. "'Two young women found near the freeway with their throats ripped out'."
"Sounds vampy to me."
"Yeah, maybe."
Dean glances at Sam out of the corner of his eye, his vow to himself to grill Sam about the effects of the first trial fresh in his mind.
"Listen," he says. "If you wanna take a knee on this one – y'know, if you're not feeling up to it…"
"What?" Sam gives Dean an odd look. Dean sighs.
"You know, the trials? What Cas said you got that he can't cure –"
"Which means what, exactly?"
"Well, I dunno. You tell me. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," Sam says stubbornly. "Are you okay?"
Dean blinks.
"Me?"
"Yeah. I mean…Cas hasn't spoken to you for two days. Ever since we brought him back to the bunker."
"So? What's that got to do with anything?"
Sam rolls his eyes.
"You were so keen to get Cas to come back to the bunker, and he'd only do something like that for you…and now you're barely speaking to each other. Something happened in that garage, Dean. What the hell's going on with you two?"
"You really wanna have this talk?" Dean says. "Okay, sure. Why don't I go get some, uh, herbal tea? And you can find some cowboy junkies on the dial and we'll just talk it out."
Sam bitchfaces him and gets out of the car.
"Eat me, Dean," he says snarkily, slamming the car door. But as Sam heads to the station, Dean can't help but pull his phone out of his pocket and dial Castiel's number.
"Hello, Dean." Castiel delivers this line neutrally but Dean feels like there's something missing from it. It just sounds so…flat. Blank. Devoid of any affection it might have previously held.
"Hey, Cas," he tries to say cheerfully, but he knows he misses that mark by a long shot.
"What do you want? I'm busy."
"What, with translating old books like a little old librarian?" Dean says before he can help himself. The silence that follows is deafening. "Sorry."
"Don't apologise," Castiel said coolly. "After all, I am only staying here at your request, so please continue with those insults that you call jokes. Forgive me for wanting to keep my mind occupied."
Dean winces. Man, Castiel is pissed.
"Look, man, I'd love nothing more than for you to tag along," he says almost pleadingly. "But I don't want Naomi getting her hands on you and fucking you up again. 'S not like I'm asking you to stay there all the time for shits and giggles. So it'd be really nice if you could quit with the attitude, when I'm just tryin' to keep you alive."
Castiel heaves a long, deep sigh.
"You're right. My apologies, Dean. I just…I hate feeling useless. Like a burden. I can't do anything to help you because of my own past foolishness, which has resulted in me becoming wanted by Heaven. I should not be taking my anger out on you."
"Hey, I get it," Dean says placatingly. "Trust me, I'd be going stir crazy in your position."
"No, you wouldn't. If you were in my position then you would not allow yourself to be bound by such a 'trivial request' and you'd be out hunting anyway."
Dean snorts. Then he snorts again, because who else has a guardian angel that knows all about their bad habits?
"True. Anyway, I gotta go. Just wanted to see how you were goin' back there."
"I'm fine. Dean…I want to talk to you. I keep trying to tell you about my feelings for you but –"
"That can't happen," Dean interrupts. "Trust me, Cas. I'm the reason all this shit is happening to you. And anyway, you wouldn't wanna tie yourself to some dumb schmuck like me."
"Dean, I –"
"Gotta go – talk to ya later – see ya, Cas."
Dean can't hang up quick enough before heading into the station to meet Sam inside, who's already talking to the sheriff. Sam turns when he hears Dean's footsteps.
"And here's my partner," he says, nodding at Dean and flipping his FBI ID open. Dean does the same thing.
"FBI?" The sheriff squints at their badges. "You're here about the Lady Killer Murders, aren't you?"
Sam and Dean exchange a look.
"The Lady Killer Murders?" Sam says slowly.
"Yep. Coined it myself."
Dean wants to roll his eyes at how pleased the sheriff looks with himself.
"Congratulations. What can you tell us?"
Leading them back to his desk, the sheriff tells them that both women were under the age of twenty one and found drained of blood; the 'kicker', as he describes it. It's when he pulls out CCTV footage of a place called Fuller's Point, a place that they keep surveillance on for acting as a magnet for horny teenagers, that shit gets real.
'You gotta be kidding me,' Dean thinks, watching the three teenagers shoot and decapitate the guy that attacks the car to get to the two of them that had been inside – clearly acting as bait, if their actions are any indication. He recognises one of the teens.
Krissy Chambers.
After ordering the sheriff to cancel the A.P.B. he put on the teenagers, Sam and Dean thank him for his time and leave.
"You remember Krissy Chambers?" Dean says when they get to the Impala. Sam frowns.
"Uh, yeah…the vetala case, right? They were working that truck stop by the freeway. She and her dad helped us shut 'em down."
"Right, and then he promised to go civilian so she wouldn't grow up to be a hunter. Well, guess who the star of this snuff film is?"
Sam's eyes widen.
"Come on," he scoffs. Then he shakes his head. "Well, maybe he doesn't know she's doing this."
"What, sneaking out in the middle of the night to go hunt monsters with the Apple Dumpling gang? Is that what kids are doing for kicks these days?"
"Okay. Then maybe he knows and he's helping her out."
Dean just rolls his eyes and tells Sam to get in the car. As he starts the Impala and drives, he doesn't know why he's taking this so personally. It shouldn't be any of his business, yet he finds himself strangely invested in this. But why? Is it because he doesn't want any more kids to be raised like he and Sam were with their own dad? Or is it because he's too familiar with broken promises?
He closes his eyes to dispel the images of Castiel, wondering why his mind is in such a 'chick' mood today. He gives it the mental middle finger, so it replies with images of windswept, sex hair Castiel that he can't get rid of. And then these images start to get even dirtier.
'Fuck my life,' he grumbles, though at the same time he's curious about whether Cas' dick is really that big and if it would really feel that good fucking his mouth.
They find Krissy holed up in a hotel room with a laptop next to her and a gun in her hand, pointed right at them. She's less than happy to see the two of them, only answering their question about her father with a curt, "Dead," before telling them to clear off and let 'us' handle 'this'.
"Us?" Sam says.
"This?" Dean adds.
Krissy ignores their questions until she's got her laptop again, at which point she just says, "Vampire."
On the laptop screen, they watch as the other two teenagers from the CCTV footage sneak into the room where a terrified girl is tied up and are quickly detected by the vampire. So naturally, Sam and Dean decide to go and help them, and as soon as they burst into the hotel room, the vampire hisses at them and throws himself out the second storey window, heading for a blue van nearby.
"I got him!"
Krissy sprints out of the room, so Dean follows her to make sure that she doesn't get herself killed. She easily takes down the begging vampire – a sight Dean has only seen a handful of times, with those who didn't know they were vampires or didn't want to hurt anyone – with darts full of dead man's blood, then tells Dean to back off when he takes out his machete.
"This isn't your kill!" she snaps as the other teenage girl skids to a halt next to them. Teen Girl then explains that the vampire broke into her house three months ago and killed her family, which the vampire vehemently denies until Teen Girl lops his head off.
It's at that moment that Sam arrives with Teen Boy, who Krissy says is called Aidan, while Teen Girl is Josephine. Krissy is initially hostile when Dean pulls her aside to explain herself but then she looks him defiantly in the eye and tells him everything: how she and her father got out for a few months, before she came home to find his throat ripped out by a vampire, and then how a hunter named Victor found her and took her in. She also tells Dean how Josephine and Aidan also lost their families to vampires – all from the same nest, they're sure – and how Victor is training them all to get revenge.
It's a straightforward enough story, and Dean knows that something like this can happen to any poor kid whose family is killed by monsters before they encounter a hunter kind enough – or messed up enough – to take them in. In fact, it's how a lot of young hunters get their start in the life. But something about this seems off. He just can't put his finger on it.
'Victor' turns out to be Victor Rogers, a hunter they helped to take down a rougarou in Spokane years ago. Dean's surprised to see how 'normal' Victor treats the teens, telling Josephine to get on to bed for her trig test in the morning and scolding Aidan for not cleaning his room, and resentment starts to bubble inside him towards his own father. Why couldn't John have done this with him and Sam? Dean knows that they had to have been raised as hunters; there's no way they would have survived the Apocalypse otherwise, and he's always grateful to John for giving them the skills they need even today. But Krissy, Josephine and Aidan seem to be pretty well-trained for amateurs in this 'balancing act' life, so what had stopped John from simply moving house to get away from the memories and giving Sam and Dean a mix of both lives?
Oh, right. Alcohol and too much resentment and vengeful tendencies. Story of Dean's life.
"So, how does this work?" Dean says when he, Sam and Victor are sitting in the living room. "What, after soccer practice and – and bake sale, they chop vampires' heads off?"
Victor shrugs nonchalantly.
"Well, yeah. I think a balanced approach is best, don't you?"
"They're kids! They shouldn't be hunting at all. You gotta break this up right now."
Dean half-expects Victor to get pissed off at him. Instead, the man looks calm as all hell, though his eyes do glint dangerously.
"When I found them, they were lost…confused…angry. I gave them family and purpose. And you want to take all that away? Why?"
"So they don't get killed," Sam says as though this should be obvious. It's then that Victor starts to harp on about his plan to train 'the next generation of hunters' to be better – insulting Garth, Bobby and 'other rougarou hunter they helped' Martin in the process – and explains just how the teens he's taken in are going to be better than someone 'dropped on his head when he was a baby', a 'barely functional alcoholic' and an 'insane' guy. He's just lucky that Dean doesn't want to risk pissing off the Junior X-Men, or else he'd be flat on the floor for his comment about Bobby.
After a bit of investigating – including questioning the tied-up woman from the motel, who claims that the vamp they'd killed hadn't been the one to kidnap her – Sam and Dean are sufficiently suspicious of Victor and this supposed vampire nest. Their suspicions are only compounded when Victor pulls the kids out of school for a hunt with a dodgy surveillance photo lacking a time stamp, and so Dean heads to a place called 'Conway Springs Lodge', which the woman's real kidnapper had taken a brochure for, while Sam stays with Victor to track down the driver of the blue van that had been parked outside the hotel the teenagers had killed the other vampire in and which has been parked outside Victor's house for a while now.
Dean's on his guard when he arrives at the lodge, machete in one hand and flashlight in the other. He sneaks up to the building and forces his way in, careful to make as little sound as possible in the process, and he's overly aware of how loud his footsteps are on the creaking wooden boards. He winces; if they're loud to him, he'd bet his best shotgun that any vamps around can hear him as well.
He's proven right a moment later. However, he isn't jumped by a bloodthirsty vampire wanting to tear his throat out; instead, the vampire he finds is a poor woman who's cowering on a bottom bunk bed, and who shrieks and physically tries to get away from the bright light of his flashlight.
"What's happening to me?" she cries when her second set of teeth descend past her gums. Dean frowns. This isn't the reaction of a killer vampire who's out for blood. But he can't just let his guard down around a monster, so he tugs her off the bed and holds his machete to her neck.
"That's never happened to you before?" he says. The girl wildly shakes her head, the machete slicing a thin line of red across her throat as she does so.
"No! There's – there's something wrong with me! That guy – he did something to me!"
"What guy?"
"I don't know! This guy in a blue van, he – he grabbed me and took me here!" She doubles over, groaning. "My stomach…it hurts so much!"
It's then that Krissy, Josephine and Aidan arrive, guns blazing – or, more accurately – machetes out.
"Dean?" Krissy hisses. "Why are you with the vamp that killed my dad?"
Dean briefly wonders if this is how bloodthirsty and blind he used to be. He's suddenly vividly reminded of Gordon Walker and has to shake his head to dispel the image of that psychopath.
"You're barking up the wrong tree," he says. "She didn't kill your pops."
"I don't want to hurt you, Dean." Krissy's eyes narrow. "But I will if you don't move."
Dean doesn't know how he's going to convince these three enraged teens that the vampire is innocent but he's going to give it his best shot. He's met Lenore and he's met Benny; he's also met Gordon and Martin. He knows now that not all monsters are monsters.
"Listen to me, Krissy. She's innocent."
"How would you know that?" Josephine spits.
"She's fresh made – maybe a day or two. But Krissy's dad was killed months ago. And the vamp we killed last night? Why would he swear he didn't do it?"
"Uh, because he was a liar?" Aidan says.
"Vamps don't beg for their lives; they attack. Look, last time I'm gonna ask you nicely. Take the damn guns off me, or somebody's gonna get hurt."
When Aidan simply snorts, Dean makes a show of quickly and efficiently disarming him, dropping his weapons on the floor. But the teens still aren't having any of it.
"So, let's say this isn't the vamp who killed my dad," Krissy says. "She's still a monster. She still deserves to die."
It's when he reveals that there's a cure for vampirism and the teens uncaringly ask why they should help her that Dean finally realises just why this war between monsters and humans keeps dragging on. Sure, the monsters who kill deserve to die. But the hunters really aren't any better. They're all blinded by their hatred and rage, convinced that they have to kill every Jack and Jill who is anything less than pure human.
But not all monsters are beasts, are they? After all, there's Castiel. He's not human, no matter how much he might look like one on the surface. But he's not a monster. He's not like the other winged dicks. Heck, if he was, Dean wouldn't…he wouldn't have fallen for the nerdy guy.