Chapter 13: Department of Supernatural Investigation (DSI)

AN: this one is going to be hard; because I no longer watch SPN, nor do I like what they've done to SPN, so I have to get this right. I promise this will make some sense, once I am done. This one is part of a continuation of another crossover that I wrote. Still not finished, well, not typed anyway, but in need of major re-editing. I made a few mistakes with it and didn't do my research, but now that I have I'm going to fix those mistakes so that this chapter will make sense when you read it.

Reading that story is not needed, but it will definitely help with some of the contexts left out of this chapter. For all of you SPN fans, who read this, please don't kill me!

On to the fic

When Steven had first heard of the Winchester family, he had thought them no more than a bunch of mindless brutes, lacking any and all fineness in dealing with Supernatural problems. First of all their credit card schemes were a joke, one that he traced back to them in a New York minute. Then there were their constant impersonations of federal, local, and state law enforcement; a joke at best and an insult at worst. Steven saw through the FBI file in a hot minute, and realized that these people were genuinely helping people; but they were going at it the wrong way. Steven knew that there was an old department within SHIELD that was once dedicated to investigating the supernatural and dealing with it, but it had long since been relegated to a joke at best and punishment at worst. Most agents that got sent to the Supernatural Phenomenon Investigation Division within SHIELD never saw the light of day again as a field agent or an intelligence analyst, and spent the majority of their days filing and reorganizing the old archives of Supernatural Objects, (or SOS's to the agents) or archiving old case files from the fifties. It was almost painful to watch what was once one of the most active parts of SHIELD be turned into a glorified desk job. Steven had no idea how to fix this, until he met the brothers. They were grating, disrespectful to authority, flaunted the law like a modern day Bonny and Clyde, but most importantly they left a trail of closed cases, and saved civilians wherever they went. Their methods may have been crude, but they were effective. And as Steven thumbed through the dossier on the pair, he realized with the right tools, and proper money to back them they could be a formidable pair.

Steven took his proposal to Jack to start their own Supernatural investigation department within the CIA, but before he could confront the pair and give them the pitch, the two brothers were suddenly on the most wanted list with the FBI. To say that he was irritated, was understating it. he knew that these boys were the key to taking back a part of SHIELD that had been neglected and lost by HYDRA and it's manipulations; not only that, but the umbrella of SHIELD would give these Hunters an authority that they lacked on their own, as well as discipline and a regular paycheck. Steven knew that the name Winchester carried a lot of weight in the Hunter community, and if he could get the brothers on his side, Steven knew he could get others. So the only solution to his problem was to squash the case the FBI had against the brothers in its infancy. But before he could do that his contacts discovered that Dean was on a one way ticket to Hell. Steven just about panicked, when he heard the extenuating circumstances behind Dean's deal with a devil. Michael had told him about his brothers plans to release Lucifer and Dean was supposedly the key to the first Seal. The Righteous Man, the Sword of Michael; only he wasn't. Steven had dug quite deep into the family records and to his shock he discovered a small sealed file on Dean from around the time he was born. That sealed file turned out to be adoption papers, and Dean's real birth certificate naming him as an abandoned baby with no known parents. The adoption papers named John and Mary Winchester as his legal parents, but not his biological ones. When Steven confronted Michael about this he was stunned, but not surprised that his brothers would condemn an innocent just for the sake of their own boredom. Michael and he were setting up plans to interfere when Steven's worst nightmare happened: HYDRA found his Ada and took him; and with that all their hopes died.

In his grief and rage he had all but forgotten about the brothers until an unlikely source came to him for some forged documents: Avery Elfstar. Steven would have normally shrugged this off and given him the papers, but when Avery told him who the papers were for, he couldn't help but be curious. Steven had never met Finrod Felagund but his family owed their existence to the elven king. He had even told Maedhros that Finrod was alive and in the states. The red haired elf was so shocked he was completely silent for all of ten seconds before the Fëanarion demanded the address from Steven. Steven went with him, and the reunion between the two distant half cousins was tearful and sweet. Steven's attention, though, was quickly drawn to the young man standing near Finrod, who looked as if he could have been Dean's twin. And as he came to find out, he was Dean's twin. Wasn't that a shock? That Dean had a twin brother, and was Finrod's eldest son, and Beren's half-brother was even more shocking. Steven gave them everything that they would need to prepare for Hunting, including sending Brego to a mixed martial arts trainer; a former soldier and colleague of his.

Several months, and many very frightening signs and portents later, Steven had regretted not going with them just to punch Zachariah in the face. Discovering through a second hand source that he and another angel called Uriel were responsible for his Ada's kidnapping and recapture by HYDRA was enough to make him lose his not insignificant temper, and black out half the state in the process; for a few minutes, but still. So when Steven got word through the grape vine that the brothers were going to be performing some ritual, one that he had never thought would be performed again, he hopped on the first CIA chopper out to the mid-west and towards ground zero for the spell.

Steven stepped off the running boards and ducked under the rotors. He looked up and glanced around to find the ground scorched with the intricate marks of an Enochian Seal; more specifically, Michael's. And seeing as how Steven couldn't feel Lucifer's boiling pot of rage and pride, with a very unhealthy amount of indignation, Steven surmised very quickly that they had won. The blond haired former assassin sighed with relief, before he turned his eyes on the Winchesters and company. He arched a regal brow at the sight of Castiel, and Gabriel, both covered in dust, and the poor little Seraph sporting a bloody nose and pathetically pitiable matted wings.

"Dean and Sam Winchester," Steven asked, channeling Steve at his most authoritative. The two brothers reacted differently. Dean straightened his spine out of the lazy slouch into full military attention, whereas Sam bristled for a moment before forcing himself into a lazy version of military rest. After a second Dean forced himself out of his stance, and back into the slouch, but with a more alert and cautious glint in his eyes. 'Interesting,' Steven mused, before he arched his brow again. Dean's eyes raked over Steven's form, no doubt looking for weaknesses, which he would not find, before he glared defiantly up at him.

"Who wants to know," Dean asked with a defiant grin. Steven smiled fondly, reminded of the Howlies for a moment, before he stepped forward and into the light; the brim of his cover shading his eyes but not enough to hide his features. Steven saw the exact moment Dean recognized him; his jaw dropped open and a look of childish awe bloomed across the younger man's features. "Holy Shit," Dean whispered, "you're supposed to be dead?" Steven shook his head a little in amusement as a grin pulled wide across his face. He held out his hand, the right one, showing the Hunter his Mithril cast Officer's ring.

"Not hardly," Steven drawled as he shook Dean's hand. A quick glance out the corner of his eye showed the same child-like wonder on Sam's face as well. "My name's Captain Steven Buchanan. I'm here on behalf the CIA and Army Intelligence," he said, then with a lopsided grin that was every bit his Ada's, he added, "I'm here to offer you a job." The two brothers looked back at each other, and shared a dubious look, some sort of silent communication passing between them, and Steven couldn't help but smile. He did the same thing with his brothers, only they were communicating telepathically.

"What… kind of a job," Dean finally asked after a minute, his voice hesitant but open. Steven's smile pulled into a please grin.

"An intelligence agency is going to contact you and your brother to restart a department within its ranks to do what you already do," Steven explained, and then added casually, "only with better funding, more resources and an actual paycheck." The two brothers shared another look and Steven pressed on, "you, your brothers, your father, and Mr. Singer here," Steven said as he nodded towards the gentleman in question, "are going to accept the offer, only you won't be working for him. You'll be working for me. I need your help with a personal project concerning national and world security." The brothers looked at each other with wide eyes and well-guarded nervousness.

"What are we gonna do," Dean asked after a minute of silence.

"You'll be spying on them for me and a few select agents within the agency concerning said project," Steven answered. The brothers shared another look before Sam finally spoke.

"Why," he asked.

"They took my Ada," Steven answered, "and they have Michael." The brothers' eyebrows shot to their hairline, and Steven saw Gabriel pale out of the corner of his eye beside Castiel. The little Seraph had a look of unguarded horror on his face, as he leaned against Gabriel. The Winchester's shared a look before Dean turned back to Steven with a look of hardened resolve.

"Okay," he said, "just to clarify: what's this thing we're gonna be spying on for you, and who's the agency?" Steven gave them a smile that could only be described as luminous.

"You will be attempting to discover the location of Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes," Steven said once he regained his composure, the clarified further, "The Winter Soldier." Steven was met with looks of pale-faced shock, which told him that the men knew of the infamous assassin. Steven then smiled blandly, and added, "My Ada." The silence was near deafening, before Sam snapped out of it.

"Who's the agency," he asked, once he regained his voice. Steven's responding smile was sly and devious.

"The Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division," Steven answered.

"Huh," Dean asked with a bewildered look on his face. Steven smiled again and took pity on him.

"SHIELD," he answered with a bland and clam smile, "director Fury might come himself or he might send Agent Coulson, or Romanoff, to recruit you. Put up a fuss, and make reservations, and stipulations, but say yes," Steven ordered. "They'll put you back in the good graces of the Law, and in turn, you will help me root out an old enemy within their ranks." The pair nodded absentmindedly, and with that he turned and nodded to the pilot who started the helicopter again. Just as he was about to head back into the chopper a voice called out from behind him, causing him to stop and turn around.

"Wait," Dean's twin asked, "who's this enemy?" Steven turned to look over his shoulder and fixed him with the same look of cold hatred that had sent Red Room agents screaming for the hills.

"HYDRA," he said, and turned back to the helicopter and stepped inside.

That moment had started off a chain of events that had not only restored the agency's knowledge of the Supernatural, but had put them in a position to do something about it. So over the next two years, Steven had helped them with bringing the SHIELD's Supernatural Investigation department back up to snuff; Unofficially of course, because he couldn't be involved. Rebuilding a major department within a secret paramilitary agency was not easy, and though they had officially started the work years before, it was only until after Steve had been recovered and the sky opened over New York that the department really and finally took on new agents. Dean and Sam were on the other side of the country when the Attack started and the Battle of New York began. Dean knew they wouldn't make it back in time but the two of them floored it to the nearest SHIELD airport and took a cargo plane back to the east coast.

For the first time in their lives, the two could finally show their real ID and get something done. Having a fancy badge and security clearance upwards of level nine definitely had its perks. Dean looked back at Sam as Steven and his brother put the last final touches to the department's new laws and regulations; their Departmental Charter.

"What are we gonna call it," Dean asked, causing Sam to look up at him with confusion, while Steven continued to type away. it had taken a while to get used to the telepathic powers of their unofficial boss, but Dean found that he was thinking of the craziest things just to crack a smile out of the normally stoic Captain.

"I had, wrongfully, assumed we would use the agency's old name for the department," Steven said, "but seeing as it is the Supernatural Phenomenon Investigation Division, or SPID for short, something I'm sure Howard came up with," Steven pulled a face of annoyance while he rolled his eyes, "we could call it something else." Sam looked thoughtful for a moment before looking at Dean.

"How about the Department of Supernatural Investigation," Sam asked, as he looked to Steven and Dean for approval, "or DSI for short?" Steven smiled minutely and nodded all the while not taking his eyes off the screen.

"Sounds good to me," Dean said, and leaned back in his chair to look around the partition at Castiel, "what do you think, Cas?"

"I don't understand you humans' constant need to label things," Castiel replied with his gravelly voice. "It's pointless, and a waste of time. In a few decades someone else might think it dumb and change it." Dean rolled his eyes and shook his head in mock despair, before turning to his twin.

"It sounds official, Castiel," Brego said, "it garners a level of authority and officially that they didn't have before. Not only that we need something to go on the badges," he added with a grin.

"Man this is so cool," Dean gushed, with a childish grin. "Not only are we going to have real honest to God official government badges, we're getting paid to do what we've always been doing: Saving people, hunting things." Sam let out an ungraceful snort.

"I'm just glad we don't have our faces plastered all over the FBI's most Wanted List anymore," Sam said. "Having an HQ will go a long way towards organizing and helping get Hunters working together."

"Yeah," Dean said, with a long stretch as he leaned back in his chair, "now all we gotta do his find one. Not that I don't like working with SHIELD, in all. They're great, but let's face it D.C. is no place for a Hunter's HQ. Most of our work is in the middle of the country." Steven smirked and finished the last bit of typing before he saved the document and printed it. He slid away from the desk and leaned back for a long languid stretch. Steven's body went stiff before he relaxed and stood up. "I can't believe a guy like you could spend so much time behind a computer."

"I'm an analyst," Steven said with a grin, "I spend most of my time analyzing data."

"I can't believe you know this much about governmental law," Sam gushed.

"I got my degree in Military and International Law," Steven said. "I'm technically part of the JAG corp. but seeing as how I'm employed by the Agency, they'd rather I don't take any cases." Steven smirked, and huffed out a laugh. "Seeing as how I spent the better half of a century breaking those laws they rather wouldn't have my integrity called into question in court. I'm probably the only person there to have JAG pins and Jump Wings with combat stars pinned on my uniform." Steven smiled softly before he cracked his neck with a sigh. "That should be the last of it," he said as he reached down into his pocket, "here." He tossed a large ornate key over to Dean. "I think this is just the thing you've been looking for."

"What's this," Dean asked as he looked over the skeleton key.

"It's a key," Steven said, "remember that little incident a few weeks back, at the motel," he asked?

"Yeah," Dean said cautiously, "wait was that when that guy literally stepped out of our closet?"

"Yeah," Steven answered, "his name was Henry, he had a Demon on his tail, and he messed up a spell." Steven said as he picked up the very long document from the printer, "he was your grandfather."

"WHAT," the Winchesters shouted in unison.

"he had a demon on his tail and he used a spell to get away," Steven explained, "only he messed up and instead of taking him to his son it took him to Sam. And he also forgot to seal the doorway behind him."

"Whoa, whoa, wait," Dean said, "back up. Are you saying that there's a demon running around here from the fifties, wreaking havoc?!" Steven rolled his eyes.

"No," Steven answered succinctly, "there is not. Henry came through, and I told him to go with you. Gabriel handled the Demon. We went to the last surviving member of the Men of Letters…"

"Men of Letters," Sam asked, and Steven sent him an impatient glare. "Sorry."

"Anyway, we went to his friend, and he told us the location of a bunker," Steven explained further, "the Men of Letters base of operations. It's a vault, reinforced with the most powerful spells I've ever seen, and inside is the largest repository of knowledge on the Supernatural in existence. If it existed they had it. Well most of it, anyway. They couldn't get their hands on Numenorean documents or elvish ones either. Pool it together with Bobby's library, and you've got the best weapon any Hunter could have against evil: Knowledge." Steven turned and looked at them. "I thought that you could repurpose it as our agency's new HQ. Henry's been working on clearing out some of the barracks to get them ready for daily use." Dean and Sam looked at one another before glancing at Castiel, Finrod and Brego.

"Sounds like we found the Bat Cave," Dean said with a giddy grin.

The first creed of the DSI is Murphy's Law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. It was a motto that the Winchester brothers lived by most of their lives, and for the most part it served them well. And when starting up their new agency, or rather department within SHIELD, it became the unofficial departmental saying, for with monsters anything could happen. And with that in mind, Steven constructed the department's entry exams. Steven wanted to bring to the agency the drive for justice and protecting the innocent that most if not all Hunters had, but on the same hand he and the Winchesters thought it prudent to use these tests as a pseudo-psych exam to weed out the most unstable minds found among the Hunters. The overly zealous and fanatical were dropped from the program pretty quickly through the entry exams. Other tests further weeded out the more unstable minds from the overly eager and willing to please, and driven personalities that tended to make up the majority of Hunters.

At first when Hunters heard about the tests and exams they thought it was a fool's errand. Hunters were loners and slightly off their nut, but that was what made them work so well. Steven thought otherwise. He told them that they were not trying to exclude anyone, just weed out the ones that gave Hunters a bad name. It was reluctantly accepted when the tests failed the men that the general Hunters network thought too crazy to work with. After that, the test were begrudgingly tolerated as an irritation you had to get past before then next stage of recruitment, what Dean and Steven had dubbed Boot Camp but the recruits called something else: Trial by Fire, Hell's Proving Grounds. A two month series of intense physical fitness training, as well as mental fitness testing on par with SEAL training, that pushed each recruit, man or woman to the brink of their endurance and beyond. These courses were mandatory, for field work and would weed out the field men from the desk jockeys, and researchers. And to show no favoritism, even Sam and Dean went through the courses, tests, training and all. After field training, came book training, teaching each Hunter how to go into a case not like a man trying to get around the law but work with it to get the job done. This turned the Hunters into Researchers and Analysts that would have made the agency proud to have them. The instinctual eye each Hunter had when finding and sniffing out a case, led to great detective skills, and their ability to solve the case quickly and deal with the problem is why Steven wanted to pull already tested and seasoned Hunters into the agency to become not Hunters with a badge, but Agents with a Hunter's instincts.

Once training was finished, the Hunters were broken up into two groups, Field workers, or Agents, and Analysts. In the field agents, this was broken down further into teams, or units that consisted of two Hunters, a team leader and a backup, the field analyst or researcher, and the third man, usually a powered individual, a mutant of Class three or higher, or in rare cases, like Dean and Sam's case, an Angel. Angels that discovered their brothers' deception and betrayal of Michael were rightfully outraged and disgusted that they were being used as pawns for who they eventually believed to be Lucifer's servants. These Angels, rather than stay in Heaven wanted to be actively involved in the search and rescue of their beloved General. Thus they joined DSI and went through their own form of training to prepare them for walking amongst humans in secret once more. Castiel took joy in teaching what he had learned from Sam and Dean about how to blend in to Human society, as well as what Steven had imparted the few times they had talked alone. Angels as a whole don't take to rapid change rather well, but for their General, they would walk into Hell itself to rescue him, and though they wouldn't be literally walking into Perdition, they would still have to deal with the discomforts of trying to hide among a people they hadn't had physical contact with in over two millennium. Trying was the kindest way of putting their difficulties. But they that came persevered and settled in well enough to fool even a Demon at first glance. And when the first class of cadets graduated and received their badges, Sam and Dean were at the top of their class; Dean as the top Field agent, and Sam as Top Field Analyst.

TBC…

End note: this was so long ago when I first wrote this that I no longer watch Supernatural. Shame, really. Oh, well. It can't be helped. I hope you liked the little bit of an Easter egg that I wrote for those of you who were still watching after the fifth season.

This chapter was hard to write. I don't know why. It's short, but the content evaded me for so long. I couldn't cut it out because I needed it, or else later chapters won't make sense. Oh well.

Oh, and for those of you that are reading the story A Child of Elves and Men, this chapter has a teaser for the last chapter of the story. And now that I have this chapter done, I have to write that one, and edit it too. (Sigh) an author's work is never done.

Next Chapter: the Star Spangled Man is D.C. bound, (yay!)