Entry tags:

a thin chain of next moments, fic: spn

A Thin Chain of Next Moments (3/4), Gen, PG-13, AU
Title: A Thin Chain of Next Moments (3/4)
Authors: batyatoon and dotfic
Rating: Gen, AU, PG-13
Warning: Character death
Word count: ~22,000 (total)
Characters/pairings: Sam, Dean, John, Bobby and others (both canon and our own), Sam/Ava, Dean/CRD, Dean/OFC, Jo/OMC
Disclaimer: Sadly, none of them belong to us except the OC's.

a/n: Follows canon up to Crossroad Blues. Puts season two canon in the blender, diverges completely from season three. It took us a while to write this; during the process we got Jossed and Kripked so many times our heads were spinning. Many thanks to our beta reader destina for her patience and her careful editing above and beyond the call of beta-dom. Title is from Bruce Springsteen.

Summary: Dean makes a deal, and lives a life.



YEAR FOUR

Dean tries a third time to fasten the cuff links, and finally manages it.

The things I do for you, Sammy. The monkey suit's possibly the least comfortable thing he's ever worn, including the actual monkey suit (well, gorilla suit) that time they had to sneak onto the fairground in Iowa. He doesn't need the mirror to know he looks ridiculous, he feels ridiculous, and the only reason he's putting up with this at all is he's got a job to do as part of the ceremony. It's kind of a ridiculous job, too -- there's no reason Sammy can't keep track of the rings by himself.

Compulsively, Dean checks his pockets. Yup, both right there -- the band with the diamond, and the simpler unadorned band that until last week was hanging on a chain around Sam's neck, until Dad finally asked for it back. And then turned right around and gave it to Ava to give Sam. Kind of thing chicks get misty-eyed over.

With a careful look over his shoulder to make sure no one else can see him from here, Dean checks his other pockets: the one with the gun and the one with the flask of holy water. Yup, he's good. And Bobby's probably finished setting the wards by now.

God help any evil sonofabitch that tries wrecking this wedding.

Meanwhile, there's a buffet table, a wet bar, and a handful of bridesmaids to talk out of their phone numbers.

Life is good.

---

For a few months after the wedding, the second-floor apartment is pretty crowded; the hunt for a bigger place to live is taking longer than they hoped.

Ava works one temp secretarial position after another, brings in enough to start saving toward a house. Sam goes back to working as a law clerk; he isn't looking for a promotion, and doesn't get one.

It's only day jobs, after all. The real job is the hunt, and they all know it.

Dean and Ava are reshelving books one Saturday morning, after a successful hunt the night before; the research to ID the monster got pretty extensive, scattered books over half the living room, and this is the first chance they've had to put anything away. Dean's thinking about how weird it is that they even own this many books, or actual bookcases to keep them in. He's never gonna get used to not being able to load everything they own into two cars.

"Hang on," Ava says over her shoulder, "leave that one out, Sam's still using it."

He blinks down at the book in his hand, and then up at her. "What for?"

She turns to give him a don't-be-a-dummy look, amused and sardonic. "What else?"

...Dammit, Sam. Dean bends to put the book back down on the coffee table, slumps back onto the couch. "He's obsessed," he mutters.

"Yeah, pretty much," Ava agrees. "Hand me that other one?"

He reaches for the heavy black volume she's pointing to, and pauses before handing it to her. "You're okay with this?"

Her eyebrows flick upward. "With what, putting books away? Uh, yeah, I think I can handle it." She reaches to take the black book.

He holds on to it. "Not the books."

Ava drops her hand and faces him with a flat measuring look. "You wanna have this conversation now, Dean?"

"You got a better time in mind?" It's meant to be flippant, but comes out serious.

She gives a small sigh, and nods. "Okay," she says. "Yes, Sam's obsessed with finding a way to save you from this deal. And no, I don't have a problem with it." She folds her arms and leans one shoulder against the bookcase as she speaks. "I'm not gonna say it doesn't get a little scary sometimes, but ... scary's kind of part of the deal, isn't it? And, okay, you know -- some women have husbands who're obsessed with their cars, or, or the World Series. At least this is something worth getting a little obsessed over."

Dean stares at her. "Oh, don't you start," he says.

"What?" Ava's hands fly up in an exasperated gesture. "He loves you, of course he wants to save you. I don't want him to quit. He wouldn't be Sam if he quit. Also, hello, I don't want you to die either, Dean."

That throws him; for a second or two he's completely off-balance, and it probably shows. Of all the things he might have expected her to say, that wasn't on the list.

Much less sharply, she adds: "And not just 'cause of what it'd do to Sam. You're a good person, Dean, and I like you, and you don't deserve to die."

If it were Sammy starting to talk like this, he could deflect it with a crack about chick flick moments or group hugs; if it were Dad or Bobby, he could hunch his shoulders and wait for it to be over. But it's Ava, and he's reduced to staring at her with no idea what to say.

"So yeah," she finishes. "I'm okay with it."

She reaches out again for the book he's forgotten he was holding, tugs it out of his hand, and turns to slide it firmly onto the shelf. "There's one that fell down under the couch, can you reach it?"

"...Yeah," he says, and hastily starts to get to his feet. "Yeah, no problem."

He sneaks a sidelong glance at her while he's on his knees, stretching one arm under the couch and batting at the book with his fingertips. She isn’t showing yet; Sam said it'll be another month or two before she does, and then another five or six months of waiting.

As always, calculating time in his head makes him think of the bigger timescale. Getting smaller all the time.

Six years to go.

---

YEAR FIVE

Dean's looking at the newspaper but has no idea, really, what the lines of text say. It's a mere reflex that makes him turn to the obits. Dad's gone off hunting for more caffeine.

He slumps in his chair and glances at his watch.

There's a footstep on the linoleum and Dean flings the paper aside. He's on his feet immediately.

"Sam? How's Ava, how's..."

"Ava's fine." Sam looks dazed. "Just fine, and uhhhh...we...it's a girl." A smile breaks over his face. "A girl," he says again, like he's savoring the words, trying them out. He inhales shakily, and then bends over, his hands on his knees. "Oh god. Oh, god, Dean, I'm a father."

"Whoa, Sammy, take it easy." Dean's not sure what else to do, so he gingerly pats his brother on the back.

"Yeah, I'm, uh, fine." Sam lowers his head, takes a long deep breath, and straightens up. "Just, it's a little, um. Wow."

"Yeah. Yeah, I'll bet it is. Nice going, bro." Dean has to swallow hard to keep whatever is swelling in his chest from getting out and embarrassing him, but it's too late. All he can do is stand there in the hospital corridor freakin' beaming at Sam, who is smiling right back. They must look like idiots.

For once, Dean really doesn't care.

A few hours later, they put his niece in his arms for the first time. He looks down into her tiny face and all he can think is that he won't see her sixth birthday.

But that's okay, too. That's okay because then Dean hands her to Dad, and Sam's saying "Her name's Mary," and for the first time since John Winchester came back out of Hell, all the cracks in him are gone.

And watching him, some crack in Dean is gone too, whole again, even if it's just for this moment. It's like there's a tiny bubble of silence around him, just him, weirdly peaceful: it was worth it. It has to be. Five years left, hellfire waiting for him, screw it all, it's worth it.

Made the right call.

---

He gets a job at a garage fixing cars and there's something satisfying about it in a different way than hunting. To take something that doesn't work and make it whole again, to get to poke around what makes a powerful machine go. The other guys don't mind if he blasts Zeppelin loud on the boombox while he works. There are grease stains on his hands more frequently than there are blood stains, but he keeps his ears open, checks the obits and discussion boards. The darkness is still out there and he feels aware of it even on the days when he doesn't hunt. He stands in the sunlight and pops the tab on a soda can and watches Sam's little girl get bigger, and the hunt is a quiet hum in the back of his head that won't go away.

---

The building's at the end of a dead end street on the bad side of town, the kind of place with graffiti all over the walls and the vacant lot next door overgrown into a wilderness. Isolated, poorly lit, and at the moment, the location of a nest of goblins.

In the residual light of dusk he first sees her: black shirt, jeans, red jacket, long black hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail. Graceful, practiced movements.

"Freeze! Police!" Her voice is clear and sharp, a little husky at the edges and a whole lot sexy, but never mind that now. He hears her quick intake of breath; yep, she's noticing now that they're not human.

One of the goblins rushes her, hissing, teeth bared.

Dean steps into the room and fires. The thing explodes in a gooey mess of goblin bits and blood. She gets splattered, but doesn't even flinch. When another one rushes her she fires, gets it in two shots.

Dean takes out the other four, then steps over goblin guts towards her. "Hey, are you--"

"Stay where you are," she says, and holds her gun on him. There's a badge clipped to her belt, in plain view.

"Oh, hey, sweetheart, watch where you're pointing that thing."

"Put. The shotgun. Down."

He laughs. "Huh. Shouldn't you be saying something more along the lines of 'thanks, mister, for saving my life'?"

"Shut your fucking mouth and put the gun down."

"Right, okay." He drops the gun.

"Kick it over here."

He does.

Keeping her gun trained on him, she unclips the badge andshows it to him. "Jill Hernandez, homicide." She puts the badge back in place, then waves the gun at him. "ID. Now."

He reaches slowly into his pocket and takes out his wallet, pulls out the fake laminated ID and tosses it to her. "Peter Grant."

She catches it, then cocks her head, studying him.

"Aren't you curious what those things were?"

"Yes. You know something about the killings?"

"You could say that." He inches forwards, calculating how to take her down without hurting her.

"Tell me what you know." She gestures with his gun and he stops.

"Sure. They were all killed by goblins."

She puts her head back and barks a quick, sharp laugh. "Goblins."

"I'm telling you. Goblins." He shrugs.

She rolls her eyes. "Why do I get all the nut jobs? We'll finish this down at the station."

"Are you arresting me?"

"Not yet."

He could try to disarm her, but there's nothing they can charge him with, and he's got a license for his gun under the name of Peter Grant. The name is clean, unless he resists arrest.

They let him go close to dawn. As he's walking out of the station, gulping down the last swallows of coffee grown cold, a voice stops him.

"Mr. Grant?"

He crumples up the cup and tosses it into the nearest trash can, the one just inside the door. The station's all scuffed, old wood, benches, faded linoleum and tired fluorescent lights. Jill Hernandez looks damn good for someone who's been awake all night.

Dean considers saying something snide, but instead he just answers, "You need something else?"

"Those things...." She folds her arms over her chest. "Outside." Her chin nods towards the door.

When he opens it for her, she slides him a look as she steps past him, suspicious, almost.

The air is sharp and cool, the light pale, streets half-empty. They go stand at the base of the station steps. "They were really goblins?"

"Why does it matter?"

"There are six people dead."

"Yeah, they were really goblins."

"You...uh...deal with things like that often?" She bites her lip, and it's one of the most adorable things he's seen in years.

"On occasion."

Her forehead crinkles, and he can see the questions she wants to ask him, but doesn't because it would make her feel foolish, and maybe even encourage him too much.

"I've got a few other unexplained homicides in my files," she says slowly. "You hungry?"

"Depends. You buying?"

"There's a coffee shop down the street that makes the best pancakes in the county."

"You're on."

---

A week later she calls him to ask for his help to solve a string of disembowelments. They track and kill the creature together.

A week after that, he's on the police payroll as a consultant.

Two weeks after that he tells her his real name and takes her out to eat at a nice place, the kind where he has to wear a tie. She shows up in a little red dress and killer heels, and he notices she has fantastic legs -- usually she wears slacks so this is the first time he's really had the chance to notice.

He tells himself not to let it happen, not to go there.

He tells himself that.

But it happens anyway.

---

YEAR SIX

They both have scars, and tell each other the stories, twined in the sheets of her bed. Bullet wounds, knife punctures, wendigos, skinwalkers, pale inexplicable marks from being torn apart from the inside out, car accidents, burns. Dean chuckles with her head against his chest and jokes that he's going to start keeping score. They bet on it, and she starts counting on her fingers, grinning.

"I win, Winchester."

"No way."

"Druggie that stabbed me last June. That makes ten for me. Nine for you."

"Crap."

"Eggs over easy, and I like my orange juice fresh-squeezed."

---

They've been doing this thing they do for about two months. He's just finishing a job, watching flames devour scraps of old cloth, decayed flesh, dry bone, when he gets the phone call.

He barely remembers the drive across town. Dean walks down the hospital corridor, feeling like his head's not quite attached to his body, trying to forget the sound of a heart monitor's steady beep becoming a high steady whine.

He's always had nightmares of aimlessly wandering hospital corridors, shouting at people who never respond.

He stops a few yards from her door, suddenly conscious that his jeans have weird stains on the knees and his hands are still covered with the residue of the job. He wipes his palms on the thighs of his jeans and huffs out a breath before going in.

She's lying in the bed, tubes running out of her arms, connecting her to an IV, to the heart and BP monitor. Jill's not a small woman, she's almost as tall as he is, but right now she looks tiny. She looks the way she must have looked when she was a child.

She turns her head and a slow smile spreads over her face. "Hey. You're here," she says, like she didn't think he would be.

"Hi." He stands a few feet from the bed, feeling like an idiot, wondering if he should take off his jacket, decides to leave it on. "You uh...you okay?"

"Yeah. Damn bullet missed my kidneys, thank God." She shifts in the bed, trying to push herself up more, winces. "Stupid punk kid, barely even knew how to fire a gun, got lucky."

As she tells him what happened, the cadence of what she says is familiar, if not the words. It's never something you really think you should be afraid of that gets you.

He stares at the pulse beating at her throat, at the surgical tape on her arm holding the IV needle in place, and can't hear what she's saying anymore.

"Hey, hey," she says, and waits until he focuses again. "You look like you're gonna barf."

He takes her hand, squeezes it, and she squeezes back. Then he puts his head down on the blanket, cheek up against the warm curve of her hip. He feels her fingers dig into his hair and rest there against his head.

They sit like that without talking for a long time, while her heart monitor beeps steadily.

---

He hasn't met her family, and she hasn't met Sam or Dad. He hasn't even told them about her yet. Dean puts away the groceries he got for her, listens to her laughing over the phone in the other room, and feels like he's standing at the edge of a cliff.

The idea of losing her isn't the worst of what frightens him. Learning that losing her would frighten him is definitely news, but he can take worry. He's done worry all his life.

She'd believe him, if he told her: it isn't cancer or AIDS, he’s just hellbound. Literally.

It's really a math problem. A question of numbers. Subtraction. He has four years left. Dean's marked, spoken for, and his life's a shitstorm.

No, what terrifies him the most is knowing he has the power to pull the joy out of her eyes.

---

Considering that he's never broken up with anyone before, it turns out to be a simple enough thing to do.

Especially since he doesn't directly, y'know, break up with her.

He waits until she's feeling better, and they start going to parties again. He starts flirting too much, says things cruder than usual (and Dean can just about see Sam's disapproving frown, hear a furious what the hell were you thinking?). Drinks a lot. Far too easy to become the stereotype of what a number of her friends think he is, what he knows he sometimes seems to be: a rootless womanizer, a slacker, a slob.

Her wound heals into a long, thin scar, pale against her dark skin. He wonders how much more it'll take to make her angry enough. Turns out making out with one of her friends is enough to push her over. That, and laughing about it when Jill catches them.

Dean stands unmoving while she curses him out in English and Spanish. He expects her to slap him.

She doesn't.

Instead, she punches him, a quick jab into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him and fuck, she's strong, he'd forgotten she was that strong.

"Get out," she says, her eyes dry and frightening.

He does.

And it's over. Like that, it's over.

---

YEAR SEVEN

A hunt every night, sometimes two if he can find them. Sam, Ava and Dad start to remark on the circles under his eyes.

"Dude, you need to take it easy." Sam frowns, bandaging the nasty scrape along Dean's arm.

Dean doesn't say anything. He's got an old song stuck in his head, something about memories always start 'round midnight...

Four years left. No, three.

The days are slipping through his fingers, too fast, it's all too fast.

---

YEAR EIGHT

"Sam!"

"Dean, it's three in the morning here, what are you..."

"Need a little bit of advice, little brother."

"What's that noise? Are you in the middle of a hunt?"

"Actually, I am...fighting this...oh, goddamn, I can't even identify it. What do you make of this?"

"Video's a little fuzzy, Dean...oh. Oh, okay, I see it. Holy shit."

"Got a Latin incantation to fix that?"

"Give me a second ... Ava, hand me that book -- no, the other one, next to the -- yeah, thanks. Okay. Dean, repeat after me, exactly as I say..."

---

"Jesus, Sam, where are you?"

"Calcutta."

"Find anything?"

"A scroll, it's old. I'll have to hire someone to translate it."

"How're Ava and Mary?"

"Having a blast. We're heading over to London next, some guy who used to be a curator at the British Museum has a text that might help. Says he knows something about demons, although he says vampires are his specialty. How's Dad?"

"He's good, Sam."

"Okay, gotta go. I'll call in a few days."

---

"Listen, Sammy, something I think you should know about. Couple of nights ago, I ... I woke up in the middle of the night and Dad was gone. Left his cellphone."

"Jesus, Dean -- "

"No, no, it’s okay. He’s back. He drove up right when I was about to call you. Said he had a nightmare, a bad one, and needed some air."

"...Don’t scare me like that."

"Sorry."

"Is he okay?"

"Says he is, but you know what Dad’s like. But he's been doing so great the last few years, right? I thought he wouldn't..."

"Did you ask him what it was about?"

"..."

"I couldn't hear you, Dean."

"I said, yes, I asked him."

"Well, what did he say?"


"He said it was about me."

"Oh."

"He said...because he was thinking, as he fell asleep, how there's only two years left."

"Dean, listen, we're in Romania and I might have something, it's an old scroll that..."

"Sam..."

"And the guy who's selling it, he says he's heard this legend, that if you..."

"Sam!"

"What."

"I know how hard you're working on this, Sam. You don't have to tell me. Okay?"

"I just wanted you to know. There's still time, Dean."

"Yeah. Say hi to Ava and give Mare a hug for me."

---

"Shtriga. Just like the one that came for me."

"Fuck."

"It came for my daughter, Dean."

"Take a deep breath, Sam. She's okay, Ava's okay..."

"I should've been there, but I went to the next village on a lead."

"I said breathe, dammit."

"Yeah. Okay."

"Look, Ava was there, right? She knows by now how to handle things like this."

"She said she shot it six times. Scared it off, didn't kill it. She couldn't let it feed."

"So you'll get your shit together, you'll go hunt it, you'll kill it."

"It's been so long."

"I know."

"It really, it just makes me think, y'know?"

"About what?"

"About how Dad. How the fuck did he bear it, Dean?"

"You kill that thing, you pack up the family, you come home. Got it?"

"But I have to..."

"You want to do something for me, Sam, you'll come home."

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