Chapter Text
Her name is Lydia.
Her name is Lydia, and she has long brown hair and wide eyes, with a pretty smile. She’s a grad student and she just got her dream job, and when Dean tells her that he’s got a trust fund and a big black car, she demands to see it. The car, not the trust fund.
Lydia runs her hands along the top of Baby and makes the appropriate cooing noises. Dean bats his eyelashes at her and lures her into Baby’s backseat by smiling at her with his tongue pinned between his teeth.
Lydia looks like she’ll touch him gentle, but she nearly pushes him into the Impala. She climbs on top of him, kisses him hard, and together they divest him of his shirt. His pants only get halfway down his thighs, which is further than her skirt gets. She puts her hands on his chest and bats his hands away when he tries to unhook her bra. After it’s over, she rolls off of him and pulls her shirt back on. Finds her panties and pulls them back up her legs.
“I have a motel room,” Dean says, propped up on his elbows.
“I have school tomorrow,” Lydia says. She tosses her hair and turns around. “I should go.”
“Okay,” Dean says. She’s reaching for the door when suddenly he remembers-- “Wait.”
“What?” she asks, fingers on the handle.
“Condom. We didn’t--are you--?” Lydia laughs. She leaves the door behind, kisses him again. Dean sighs into it.
“Of course we used a condom, silly,” she says. “ And I’m on the pill.”
“Oh,” Dean says. He does remember that, kind of, the crinkling of the foil wrapper, latex sliding over his dick. “Okay, good.”
“Good,” Lydia says. She presses a final kiss to his mouth. “Okay, bye.”
“Bye,” Dean says. She finds her purse in the footwell and leaves, only stumbling a little over her heels. Dean watches her go.
This case is going badly. Dean doesn’t know what on Earth could be chopping off people’s hands and feet. It’s kind of ritual, and he’s thinking pagan god of some kind, but the library is giving him zip so far. And Dean--Dean hasn’t touched anyone since Ohio. He doesn’t like being alone. He thought maybe Lydia would make him feel better. Get back on the horse, so to speak.
Lydia’s hair swings behind her as she walks away. She doesn’t look back. Dean lays down. Baby cradles him. She, at least, touches him gently. He doesn’t really feel any better.
Dean goes back to the morgue. All the victims are the same. Thrown across the room, made to suffer. No hands, no feet. A symbol carved into their chests, and signs of forced entry in their houses. Dean draws a picture of the symbol carved onto the victims’ chests, then he goes to the library. Again. Goes back to the ancient folklore section. The librarian smiles sympathetically at him. She thinks he’s working on a research project. He grabs a couple books at random and pictures Sammy, not too far from where Dean is now, in the Stanford library. Doing actual research projects. Maybe with friends, or his girlfriend. They work on the project together, and then go out to lunch. Sam’s roommate steals Sam’s french fries and Sam’s girlfriend shares her milkshake with him. When he eventually turns in his research project, he gets an A on it. The same grade he gets on all his assignments.
Dean dumps his pile of books onto a table. The table he camped out at yesterday is occupied by a couple of tweenage girls. He takes the drawing of the symbol from his jeans pocket and smooths it out in front of him. Maybe the symbol is the key to cracking the case. He commits the lines and circles to memory, then opens the book on top of the stack and flips through it, searching. Searching, searching.
He discards the first book, picks up the second one. Why’d he even drop out of school if all he does is school, anyway. God, Dean misses Bobby, but he hasn’t spoken to Bobby in years and years and he can’t call now. Bobby’s probably forgotten all about him, anyway. He rejects the second book, then the third.
Hunting is easier with two people, Dean thinks. He ditches the third book and stands up. He needs food or something. He goes over to the librarian. She’s a bit older than him, but pretty. If his dad was here, Dean might flirt with her, but his dad isn’t here, and Lydia is still fresh in his mind, and so’s Ohio, and Dean can’t even manage to smile at her.
“Hey,” he says. “Can I eat in here?”
“No, sorry,” she says. According to the nametag pinned on her cardigan, her name is Leigh. “But if you head out for a few minutes I’ll watch your stuff.”
“Alright,” Dean says. He grabs his wallet. There’s a little deli across the street, and Dean scrounges up the cash for a BLT. He waits on a cracked vinyl seat for his sandwich, foot bouncing anxiously. Okay, so the victims have all been men. Some single, some married. Signs of forced entry. Weird symbol that Dean can’t find anything about. Cutting off hands and feet. Maybe it’s just freaky cult shit. Sometimes that’s all it is.
Or maybe Dean just sucks at hunting. It’s a thought he’s been entertaining more and more recently. If he was good at hunting, he wouldn’t need backup. Dad doesn’t. And he would feel more excited about it. Dean only hunts ‘cause he has to. He doesn’t want people to get hurt. But hunting sucks. If he was good at hunting then wouldn’t he like it? Sammy likes school because he’s good at it. Dean didn’t like school, because he was bad at it. The same thing probably applies to hunting.
But if he’s not good at hunting, and he’s not good at school, then what’s he good at? What’s he good for?
“Order for Harry?” a bored waitress calls, and Dean hops up, grabs the wrinkled paper bag. Harry as in Harrison, as in Han. Solo. It’s kind of a private joke, when Dean’s hunting alone.
He eats his BLT as he crosses back over to the library, cramming it into his cheeks in a few large bites. He should’ve got a drink, too, but he shouldn’t drink on the job and he’s never seen his dad drink water, so he’s pretty sure it’s not allowed. But a soda or something. Jeez.
Dean burps and throws the bag into the trashcan waiting outside the library. Back inside, Leigh nods at him and he nods back. He looks at his pile of books, and then goes to the computer. Maybe he needs a fresh start. He pulls up a web browser and searches up “monster” as well as “missing hands and feet”. The results load, and Dean resigns himself to another night at the library. After he’s done on the computer, he should check the newspapers, see if this has happened here before.
Dean wakes up in his motel room. A thin line of drool connects to the library book he’d been using as a pillow, and he quickly wipes it off. He’s surrounded by books and newspapers. Dean huffs and drops his head back down onto the open book, groaning.
There’s a moment, when Dean is hauling his shit back into the library, when he sees a woman pushing a stroller. He could swear the woman was Lydia, except that’s impossible. But, well. Dean doesn’t know anything about her. Maybe it’s not impossible.
Or maybe Dean only saw her in that dark bar and then in Baby’s dark backseat, and her nose doesn’t actually look like that, and this girl, walking her toddler, is someone else entirely. She looks like she’s Dean’s age. She could be married, have a nice guy to go home to. Dean thinks, absurdly, of himself and Lydia and a baby. Then he thinks of Ohio, and a baby with dark curls tumbling across its forehead.
Then he remembers Sam, and he decides that maybe he shouldn’t think about babies, maybe not ever again. He escapes into the library.
“Back again already?” Leigh asks.
“Yup,” Dean says. He drops his stack of books onto her desk. “Got anything similar to these?” Leigh lifts one about North American folklore up, then drops it back onto the stack.
“You’ve already finished all these?”
“Yeah,” Dean says. Well, he thinks so. He took a bunch of notes. The book he fell asleep on is tucked under Dean’s arm so he can finish going through it.
“Well, it looks like you’ve got monsters and folklore covered,” Leigh says, peering at the spines of his books. “But I think we have an ancient myth book, if that would help? What are you looking for?”
Dean smiles, tight. Feels fake on his own cheeks. “Just lookin’,” he says. “I’ll, uh, pass on the myth thing for now, but maybe later, okay?”
“Sure,” Leigh says. “I’ll be here.”
“So will I,” Dean says. Ancient myths? That’d be Greek and Roman shit, and what does that have to do with Seattle? Bubkis, that’s what. He takes his table and opens his notebook. It’s not like his dad’s journal. Cheap, shitty, from Walmart. One of those 50¢ ones that kids get for school supplies. Whatever, it works for Dean.
He flips through what he has so far. It’s ritualized. The killings have been five days apart from each other. The last one was--three days ago. He’s running out of time.
He goes back to the newspapers. So far he’s found nothing, but maybe he hasn’t looked hard enough. Maybe he’s getting lazy.
God, Dean wishes his dad were here. Or Sam. Or Bobby, or Cassie--
Cassie is a journalist. She’d probably be a rockstar at this research stuff. Dean scrubs his hand over his eyes. Sam ran away. Bobby never calls. His dad and Cassie, well. They told him to leave.
Nobody really likes him, wants him around. What’s the point? If he didn’t have to help people, he thinks maybe he would’ve just crawled into Baby’s backseat and never gotten out a while ago. But people need saving, and monsters need hunting, and so Dean’s in this stupid library.
He scrubs at his face, tells himself to stop wallowing, and he opens up a newspaper dated fifty years before the first killing, and he gets reading.
Nothing interesting. He keeps searching.
It’s all men. Everyone who has been attacked has been a man. What if the ritual is less important than the targets? Dean tries to think of who could be targeting men. Sirens, a ticked-off ghost, maybe some kind of spirit or god. He gives up on the newspapers and goes back to the books, pulling ones he’s already checked off the shelves and taking them to the table.
Sirens, harpies, pagan gods. Maybe a Medusa, a gorgon--wait, are those even real? A sphynx, maybe? Sirens, harpies, gorgons, gods. Oh.
Dean gets up and saunters over to Leigh, fake-casual.
“You still got that book on ancient myths?”
“Yeah,” Leigh says. She types something in her computer, then writes down the title and author of the book on a slip of paper, handing it over to him. He winks at her out of habit and goes to find it. The book is thick and slightly dusty when he opens it across the table.
Dean’s read Greek myth stuff before, but he’s got a lot of lore and movies and books rattling around in his head and he can’t really remember specifics. The book is a collection of myths, mostly text with illustrations sprinkled throughout. Dean starts with chapter one--“The Birth of the Gods”--and reads from there.
Dean wants to call Bobby so fuckin’ bad. Bobby would know about pagan gods and rituals and shit. All Dean has is this stupid book and the internet, which yields no results about Artemis or her huntresses, which so far is the only thing that makes any sense. Well, there are plenty of results, but none of them are helpful. Dean can’t find anything about cutting off limbs, let alone strange symbols. As near as he can tell, Artemis doesn’t even ritually kill men.
So Dean wants to call Bobby. But he can’t. He bites his lip and looks at his phone, scrolls to his dad’s contact. Last time he talked to his dad on the phone was a few months ago. Aside from that, they usually text about what case they’re on--just saying where they are, what kind of case. Dean peers at the last text in the thread.
Dean: Seattle, WA. Ritual killings?
John didn’t even send an OK. Which is fine, except Dean always sends an OK, so his dad knows he read the text. But whatever. He waffles for a moment, then gets up from the library and goes outside, bringing his phone to his ear.
The phone rings, and rings.
“This is John Winchester. I can’t be reached. If it’s an emergency, call my son Dean. 785-555-0179. He can help.”
Dean hangs up.
He goes back inside.
“We’re closing soon,” a librarian who isn’t Leigh says. He has a sweater vest on. If Dean was into admitting such things, he would think this guy was more his type than Leigh is, with his big eyes and dark hair. But he isn't, so he doesn’t. He just nods at him and goes back to his table.
Dean scoops up his notes and books. He probably looks like a dweeb dragging all this out to Baby. He throws everything on the passenger side of the seat and drives back to the motel. Low on finances, he swings by a gas station and grabs a party-size bag of chips. It’s been three days since the last killing. There are always five days in between. Dean has been in Seattle for seven days. Someone has already died since he’s arrived. It can’t happen again. Dean won’t sleep until he’s figured this shit out.
Dean wakes up, drool on his open book. He startles, notes flying everywhere. When he looks at the clock, square red letters blinking across the room at him, he sees that it’s nearly noon. Nearly noon! Today is the fifth day! Jesus fucking christ, can’t Dean do anything right?
In despair, he looks down at the book laying in front of him. He can’t believe he wasted a night sleeping with Lydia. What was he thinking?
(Self loathing, deep and strong, had welled up in him, when someone had died on Dean’s watch. He’d left the man--Jerry--’s apartment, a bunch of Jerry’s receipts crumpled in his fist, and followed one of them to a bar. The Cobalt Room. He’d told himself it was for the case, but was it? Was it for the case when he led Lydia to his car and wished he would touch him gently?)
The book is the ancient mythology book, and the open page displays some of Hercules’ labors. Cleaning the Augean stables, fighting off the Stymphalian birds. Dean turns the page. He doesn’t expect to see anything, and sure enough the page on the left describes Hercules capturing the Creten bull, and the page on the right has Hercules fighting Diomedes’ giant-ass horses. Dean turns the page again. Instead of a labor on each page, the next spread describes Hercules stealing Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons,’s belt. And the next page has a full-page illustration. In the artwork, Hercules stands in the middle, surrounded by Amazons. Hippolyta, a dark-haired chick beside Hercules, holds out her golden belt. The other Amazons are nondescript, except one of them that looks sneaky as hell. Columns wrap behind them, placing the Amazons in a temple. The columns hold up a white pediment, and inside the triangular gable a familiar symbol is etched. Dean rubs his eyes, and grabs for his notebook. He flips to the page where he’d sketched the symbol that had been carved on Jerry’s chest, the symbol that had been carved on the chest of every man who was killed.
Holy shit!
Holy shit, it’s Amazons.
Dean scrambles out of bed, grabbing his library book and shoving back on his boots. He doesn’t really care that he’s wearing the same jeans and flannel he wore yesterday. He grabs Baby’s keys from the nightstand and runs out the door. He practically leaps to Baby’s side and slides inside, swerving out of the parking lot. He can still save the next victim. He can do it. All he has to do is--is to find out what kills Amazons. To figure out the pattern--they were all men. Some married, some not. Maybe it was a proximity thing? Maybe they all touched some secret Amazon artifact? Dean wonders if he can get back into Jerry’s apartment. If he can something will stand out--
He runs into the library.
“Woah,” Leigh says.
“It’s Wonder Woman, Leigh!” he cries, diving for a computer.
“Um, okay?” she says.
“I think that guy might be insane. Like, actually,” the woman trying to check out her books says. Dean ignores her, logging in and typing “Amazons” in with fumbling fingers.
A result for some online shopping thing comes up, so Dean scrolls back up and adds “Greek myths”. He tries to remember what kills Wonder Woman as he scrolls. She’s pretty badass and stuff, but he’s pretty sure that shooting her--as long as she doesn’t block the bullets--would work just fine.
Dean finds a website. It lays down something the book doesn’t mention--the Amazons made a deal with the goddess Harmonia, their patron. They became something other than human, something strong and fast, with red eyes and a brief childhood. They became monsters, needing to feast on human flesh to survive. The stupid website doesn’t say anything about how to kill them, but it does say all Amazons are women. It does say they need men to reproduce.
Okay, Dean thinks. Okay.
He’ll need to gather an arsenal--regular bullets, silver bullets, gold bullets. Consecrated wood and salt rounds. Whatever he’s heard of that can kill a monster. And then he’ll have to figure out where a bunch of chicks would hole up together that would be inconspicuous. Warehouses, or maybe a boarding house of some kind.
He leaves the library. He still has a few books in the motel room, but he’ll return them tomorrow. And then maybe he’ll buy Leigh an ice cream or something.
First order of business is to find a bunch of wood in different materials. The second order of business will be to find a priest.
When Dean returns to the motel room to pick up golden and silver bullets, it’s nearly sunset. He’s cursing himself out for not keeping them in his car, but he usually brings that crap inside, just in case someone breaks into Baby or in case someone breaks into his motel room.
He grabs the box from under his bed and pulls his spare gun out from inside his jacket. He empties the magazine of regular bullets, tossing them onto the bed, and opens the box of special bullets. He’s not sure if he should alternate silver and gold bullets, or if he should grab another gun and load them separately. He loads a single silver bullet, then there’s a knock on the door.
Dean tosses the gun onto the bed and creeps for the door, putting a hand on the gun always tucked into his waistband. He opens the door.
The teenage girl standing there has long golden hair and a pink shirt tucked under a beige jacket. She’s wearing ballerina flats and has big brown eyes. Her hand is wrapped around the handle of a suitcase. She’s probably fifteen or sixteen.
“Please, you have to help me,” she pleads. “I know you don’t know who I am but I need help. My mom wants me to do something awful and I couldn’t stand it anymore. Can you please help me?”
Dean isn’t stupid. This ain’t his first rodeo. He doesn’t let strangers into his room or his car, no matter what innocent teenage girl face they have on. But this one--she’s got puppy dog eyes that rival Sammy’s.
“What kind of help? Why did you come here?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know, maybe if you could call a cab or let me sit down or something? Please, I just need--I need to get away…”
“But why’d you knock on my door?” She’d said he doesn’t know who she is. But does she know who he is?
“I don’t know,” she says. “There was a car parked outside, I guess I thought someone might be in here.” When Dean looks over her shoulder at the parking lot, he finds that that’s true enough. Baby is the only car parked in front of a room. He looks at her again. Come to think of it, she looks a bit like Sammy, at least in the way her lip is twisting.
Dean can’t help his stupid soft heart. He opens the door, lets her in.
“Oh, thank you so much, Mr--”
“Just Dean,” he says. He ain’t old enough to be mister anything.
“I’m Emma,” she says. Dean nods at her.
“So what, you need a cab? That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she says. “And maybe some water. If you have some. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Sure,” Dean says. He doesn’t have water but he thinks he has sprite. There’s a bottle in the fridge, maybe. He crosses the room to go get it. Not water, but close enough, right? Sure enough, the bottle is unopened, though Dean peeled off the label a long time ago. He grabs it and turns back around.
Emma has a knife out, and pointed at him. It flashes gold under the motel room’s fluorescent lights.
“Oh,” Dean says.
“Yeah, oh,” Emma says. “How stupid are you?”
Pretty stupid, Dean thinks. He curses himself. God, how has it come down to this? He grabs his gun from his pants.
“Gee, Dean, you really gonna shoot a teenage girl?”
“If I have to,” Dean says. “You’re a monster.” He supposes there’s a chance she could be a random mugger, but her eyes flash red, the skin around them going sickly yellow. Bingo.
“I’m three days old,” Emma says. “Haven’t really had a chance to do anything monstrous yet.”
“Huh?” What the fuck? It had said Amazons had fast childhoods, but three days is kind of--
While he’s distracted, she leaps at him. He tries to push her back, but she is strong. He loses his gun, falls flat on his back, wind knocked out of him. She crawls over him.
“I think I’ll saw off your hands first,” she says.
“No,” Dean says, wiggling. He can almost reach his gun-- “Emma, please, you’re just a kid, you don’t have to do this--”
“Of course I do,” Emma says. Her eyes are red and her face is fierce, but something about it seems fake. “If I don’t do this, I’ll never be a real Amazon. My mother, my tribe, will never accept me. You understand that, right? Wanting to belong?”
How does she know? How can she see right into him?
How many monsters has Dean killed, because his dad told him to? He thinks of those fucking nuns on his seventeenth birthday. He thinks of that case his dad told him to go after, the one that made him leave Ohio. And he thinks of this shitty case that he can’t even solve, even while an Amazon has him pinned to this fugly carpet. He doesn’t know what will kill her. He doesn’t know why she’s targeting him, what he did to get on the Amazons’ radar. It’s probably just his general air of incompetence.
If Dean dies, Bobby won’t miss him. Sammy won’t miss him. Dad won’t fucking miss him. Hell, maybe the next time he needs backup he’ll call Sammy, and they can make up.
But if Dean dies, Emma won’t. And she’s only three days old. Dean’s lived a shitty twenty-fix years. Emma can have a little more time.
Maybe he shouldn’t pick a monster over himself. But maybe it doesn’t matter.
“Just do it,” he says, slumping to the ground.
“A--are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Dean says. The other victims were killed after they had their hands and feet cut off. Horrible death. Dean braces himself for that pain.
Instead, there’s a blade at his throat.
When he looks at Emma, she’s crying.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I have to.”
“I know,” he says.
She slices.
Dean reaches his arms out big ‘n wide. Mommy leans down, placing Sammy gentle into them.
“Hold him tight,” she whispers. Dean curls his arms around his baby brother, holding up his head just like Mommy showed him. He looks at Sammy’s tiny nose, tiny wisps of brown curls across his forehead.
“He’s so small,” Dean breathes.
“Yes,” Mommy says. She sits beside him. “Oh, my baby boy. Look how big you are.” He looks up at her and smiles. She brushes his hair off his forehead, her touch soft and gentle. Dean leans against her. Daddy comes over to them, walking out of the golden sunlight. He sits down on Dean’s other side, throwing an arm around Mommy’s shoulders. Daddy smells good, like cars and warm stuff. He smells safe. He and Mommy create a shelter with their bodies, holding Dean safe inside. And Dean holds Sammy.
And everything is good.