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FIC: Begotten
Title: Begotten
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nilchance
Rating: Gen, PG-13 for language
A/N: Dark Angel/Supernatural X-Over. Alec gets lost, and then found.
If Manticore taught him nothing else, it taught Alec to feign unconsciousness well. It's easy as faking surrender, showing his throat to the wolves. He lingers, eyes closed, and pays attention.
Sitrep: he's bound to a chair, upright, restrained with rope. The room smells like newspaper and dog, but it isn't Joshua's home. Not enough mildew and feral sweat. There's herbs burning, something like incense. Ames White? No, not his style. Alec would be listening to endless cell phone calls and megalomaniacal ranting if it was White, and there'd be a lot more bleeding.
He doesn't remember passing out. There's no stinging wound left by a taser, no drug headache. He feels like he slept hard and too long, but not like he was ill-used. His clothes are on.
It isn't Manticore. And he was taken alone. It's irrational, but Alec is dimly comforted by that.
As he takes slow, sipping breaths, he hears the crinkle of onion-skin paper. Footsteps. A man's voice, worn as old leather: "I still say you ought to call him."
"Not yet." The second voice is younger, male, unfamiliar. "And you're sure he's human?"
"Ran every damn test in the book on him before I even called you boys. He's human as you are."
The nape of Alec's neck prickles with sweat.
"Yeah," the second says tiredly. "That's what worries me."
The first man grunts. "You want to wake him up?"
"He's awake," the second man says. Pitching his voice, he adds, "Aren't you?"
No use playing possum; it'll probably just get him hurt. Alec opens his eyes, and puts on the smile. Casual bravado. Let them think he has something to bargain with. The room is dim and claustrophobic, piled high with books. Two men sit near him, but out of striking reach. One is older but looks like he could handle himself. The one who busted Alec is younger, broad and tall as Joshua, without the big guy's easy temperament. Big is no problem, but the man also radiates a quiet sense of a mercenary. He'd kill Alec if he had to. Alec knows the type. He is the type.
There's a third man in the doorway to another room, cast mostly in shadow. He's protecting the perimeter, but Alec can't tell much more than that.
"Caught me," Alec drawls. It's hard to look indolent when he's tied to furniture, but everybody's got their cross to bear. He smirks, and the two men he can see exchange a tense look. "So here's the part where you let me go."
The second man studies Alec. His gaze is heavy, too keen, and its sincerity reminds Alec too much of Max. "Really," the second man says, with the patience of the straight man.
"Yeah, really." Alec shrugs, keeping his eyes on the men and off the rope that just slipped a little looser. "See, I've been tied to a lot of furniture this week. I've met my quota. Besides, it never works out anyway."
The first man snorts, pulling off his weathered baseball cap. "Well. Apparently the smart mouth is genetic."
The younger man gives him a wry sidelong look, but isn't distracted long enough for Alec to slip another rope. He keeps staring, and the intensity behind it sets Alec's nerves alight. "What's your name?"
"You don't know?" Alec tsks. "What passes for research these days."
The insult doesn't set the big guy back. "Do you remember how you got here?"
The test tube joke rests on Alec's tongue, but he holds it. They haven't mentioned Manticore yet, aside from that strange remark about genetics; there's no sign of White's work and no reason to assume that they're government. The whole set-up is too white trash, honestly, more pre-Pulse militia than intelligence community. According to Manticore briefs, the militias operated in the midwest, not the west coast; out of Alec's jurisdiction. But that information is old now in the world of Freak Nation and outed transgenics, and it's just Alec's goddamn luck to trip over a bunch of rednecks with too many guns and not enough smarts.
Testing the water, Alec says, "Well, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much..."
He expects to be hit. The big guy just looks at him, then back at the sentry in the doorway. His long hair tumbles over the back of his neck, but the skin is clear. No barcode. "Dean," the big guy says. There are too many undercurrents in that one word for Alec's tastes. Emotions. Complications.
The sentry sighs, cranky and unwilling, but he abandons his post. Alec spots three concealed weapons at least, plus the quiet threat of the sentry's body, and then he stops counting weapons and just stares because fuck. Fuck.
493.
No. No, 493 is dead, and Alec's match besides. The sentry isn't. He has Alec's face but wider, harder. Older by at least five years.
Older than the documented X-5 program.
"Ain't this a bitch," the sentry says tiredly, and nudges Alec's chair with his boot. "All right, kid. You're human. Quit trying to slip the ropes so I can untie you."
"I." Alec stops. He doesn't stutter, because that kind of speech pathology is selected out of Manticore early, but he shuts up until he can figure out what to say.
"Yeah," the sentry says. He kneels by the chair, and Alec has an easy shot at putting him in a wheelchair for a while, but he doesn't. He doesn't, because there's no barcode on the back of the sentry's neck and no transgenic scent on his skin. He's human, fully human. His hands are quick and deft, slicing through the ropes and letting Alec loose. The sentry sits back on his heels, squints at Alec, then shakes his head. "You've got lousy timing."
It's hard to look at his face. Alec focuses on the crease between the sentry's eyebrows. This is not above his usual level of strange. Granted, this shit always seems to happen to Max. No wonder she's always cranky. "Who are you?" he asks, level.
"Dean Winchester. That's Bobby," the man in the hat, "and my brother Sam." The big guy, glancing back at forth between them, evaluating angles. Dean pushes up to his feet. "Who're you?"
Brothers. It hits Alec like a glitch in the matrix, a hiccup in his thoughts: if Dean didn't come from Manticore, what does he mean by brother? Why does he look at Sam like he's another soldier in his unit? Sam doesn't look like any transgenic Alec knows. Adopted? No, they look too much alike. They smell alike. They're blood.
None of this makes any sense.
Alec stands up, brushing off imaginary dust from the ropes. The blood is returning to his limbs. He's unhurt. "Nice to meet you," he says. "I'm--"
And he bolts.
There's a lag of two seconds, maybe three, long enough for Alec to grab the doorframe and use it for a sharp turn. He hits the screen door before he even hears Dean curse and start running, out into what looks like a junkyard. It's a good place to run, a better place to hide. Too bad about the man-sized dogs.
Alec doesn't waste time or air swearing. He puts on speed, tearing over the top of wrecked cars, sliding on his knees across the hood and landing on his feet. He sees the fence coming and vaults up the back of a truck, uses it as a ramp for airtime. Barbed wire tears the hell out of his shin but he makes it, he's over, he's into the dusty scrub-brush lands beyond the junkyard, and he keeps running.
****
It's getting darker when he finally stops, the fluorescent lights of the bar ahead casting neon auras on the ground. There's dust everywhere, in his hair and his mouth, and his ribs ache like he's wrapped too tight in plastic. He gives himself a minute of cool-down, then sits on the curb. The wound on his shin is knitted together, bound up with dust and sweat and blood. Alec spits in his hand and scrubs the blood away, revealing the unbroken skin beneath.
Well. With that annoying, yet disturbing interlude behind him, he can start looking for a way back to Seattle. Odds are Max is having a fit.
Alec stands and starts into the bar. Two things stop him short of the door.
First, there's the cherry Harley parked off by itself, just begging to be hotwired.
Second, the date on the newspaper by the exit: 2008.
Alec takes a moment to curse before he makes his exit. The bike comes with him.
****
They come back winded and empty-handed, no sign of the kid with Dean's face. All they've got is some bloody cloth Bobby pulled off the barbed wire. After a quick drive makes it clear that the kid isn't trying to hitchhike, or that he already got a ride, they adjourn to Bobby's kitchen for beer. Bobby magically finds somewhere else to be.
Dean drinks half his beer in one swig and stares at the table. Thinking. Probably feeling guilty, since that was Dean's default.
"You want to call Dad?" Sam asks finally.
"He might not be human." Dean thumbs the bottlecap, spinning it in idle circles as he talks. "He looks like me, but there's a few hundred things that wouldn't show up on Bobby's tests."
"Like?"
"I don't know! You're research boy." Dean exhales. "Shifter."
"Checked it."
"One of those spirit recordings."
"Too solid."
"Doppelganger."
"Extinct."
Dean snorts. "Yeah, like vampires?"
Sam shrugs. "We could call around and get somebody to hunt him." Even saying it is uncomfortable. "But I think... I think he's all right."
"Yeah? Like woo-woo psychic think?" Dean smirks, immune to Sam's glare, but it fades. "All right, so the other possibility is that there's been another Winchester just... running around for the last twenty years, and we didn't know about it."
"It wouldn't be the first thing Dad hid."
"Yeah, but this? Why aren't the demons all over him? Fuck, Sammy, Dad was paranoid about protecting you, and this kid looks younger--"
Dean stops. They both stop, staring at each other across the table.
The kid is too young to be Mary Winchester's. It's a stupid, obvious thing for them to have missed, but they missed it. But if he's a half-brother, why did he look so damn much like Dean?
Where did this kid come from?
"Yeah." Sam drags a hand through his hair, forcing himself to center down on the facts they have now and the road in front of them. "Bobby's got that blood from the fence. I'll see if I can rig up some way to track him. If not, we can ask around, find a psychic or something--"
"We could let him go," Dean says. When Sam stares at him, Dean's attention veers away to his clenched fists. "Sammy, we're in it deep. And we don't know."
We don't know if he's human. We don't know if he's ours.
Sam opens his mouth, ready to snap from some hurt place. If the kid isn't human, if he's in trouble, so what? Sam is less than human, and Dean wouldn't just let him run off. If the demons found the kid, or the feds...
Dean glances up, gaging Sam, and Sam realizes that Dean isn't suggesting. He's offering. He's saying he'll leave the kid if it means protecting Sam. Even if it'll kill Dean to wonder.
Fuck, Sam is tired of translating from Winchester.
"If he looked like me," Sam starts, then lets himself trail off. He knows what Dean's answer is, even if that's not what Dean'll say to Sam's face. "He's a Winchester. I'm going to look through Bobby's stacks for a way to find him."
He leaves Dean sitting at Bobby's table.
After a few minutes, Dean comes and picks up a book. Their knees bump, and Sam hides his smile.
Author:
nilchanceRating: Gen, PG-13 for language
A/N: Dark Angel/Supernatural X-Over. Alec gets lost, and then found.
If Manticore taught him nothing else, it taught Alec to feign unconsciousness well. It's easy as faking surrender, showing his throat to the wolves. He lingers, eyes closed, and pays attention.
Sitrep: he's bound to a chair, upright, restrained with rope. The room smells like newspaper and dog, but it isn't Joshua's home. Not enough mildew and feral sweat. There's herbs burning, something like incense. Ames White? No, not his style. Alec would be listening to endless cell phone calls and megalomaniacal ranting if it was White, and there'd be a lot more bleeding.
He doesn't remember passing out. There's no stinging wound left by a taser, no drug headache. He feels like he slept hard and too long, but not like he was ill-used. His clothes are on.
It isn't Manticore. And he was taken alone. It's irrational, but Alec is dimly comforted by that.
As he takes slow, sipping breaths, he hears the crinkle of onion-skin paper. Footsteps. A man's voice, worn as old leather: "I still say you ought to call him."
"Not yet." The second voice is younger, male, unfamiliar. "And you're sure he's human?"
"Ran every damn test in the book on him before I even called you boys. He's human as you are."
The nape of Alec's neck prickles with sweat.
"Yeah," the second says tiredly. "That's what worries me."
The first man grunts. "You want to wake him up?"
"He's awake," the second man says. Pitching his voice, he adds, "Aren't you?"
No use playing possum; it'll probably just get him hurt. Alec opens his eyes, and puts on the smile. Casual bravado. Let them think he has something to bargain with. The room is dim and claustrophobic, piled high with books. Two men sit near him, but out of striking reach. One is older but looks like he could handle himself. The one who busted Alec is younger, broad and tall as Joshua, without the big guy's easy temperament. Big is no problem, but the man also radiates a quiet sense of a mercenary. He'd kill Alec if he had to. Alec knows the type. He is the type.
There's a third man in the doorway to another room, cast mostly in shadow. He's protecting the perimeter, but Alec can't tell much more than that.
"Caught me," Alec drawls. It's hard to look indolent when he's tied to furniture, but everybody's got their cross to bear. He smirks, and the two men he can see exchange a tense look. "So here's the part where you let me go."
The second man studies Alec. His gaze is heavy, too keen, and its sincerity reminds Alec too much of Max. "Really," the second man says, with the patience of the straight man.
"Yeah, really." Alec shrugs, keeping his eyes on the men and off the rope that just slipped a little looser. "See, I've been tied to a lot of furniture this week. I've met my quota. Besides, it never works out anyway."
The first man snorts, pulling off his weathered baseball cap. "Well. Apparently the smart mouth is genetic."
The younger man gives him a wry sidelong look, but isn't distracted long enough for Alec to slip another rope. He keeps staring, and the intensity behind it sets Alec's nerves alight. "What's your name?"
"You don't know?" Alec tsks. "What passes for research these days."
The insult doesn't set the big guy back. "Do you remember how you got here?"
The test tube joke rests on Alec's tongue, but he holds it. They haven't mentioned Manticore yet, aside from that strange remark about genetics; there's no sign of White's work and no reason to assume that they're government. The whole set-up is too white trash, honestly, more pre-Pulse militia than intelligence community. According to Manticore briefs, the militias operated in the midwest, not the west coast; out of Alec's jurisdiction. But that information is old now in the world of Freak Nation and outed transgenics, and it's just Alec's goddamn luck to trip over a bunch of rednecks with too many guns and not enough smarts.
Testing the water, Alec says, "Well, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much..."
He expects to be hit. The big guy just looks at him, then back at the sentry in the doorway. His long hair tumbles over the back of his neck, but the skin is clear. No barcode. "Dean," the big guy says. There are too many undercurrents in that one word for Alec's tastes. Emotions. Complications.
The sentry sighs, cranky and unwilling, but he abandons his post. Alec spots three concealed weapons at least, plus the quiet threat of the sentry's body, and then he stops counting weapons and just stares because fuck. Fuck.
493.
No. No, 493 is dead, and Alec's match besides. The sentry isn't. He has Alec's face but wider, harder. Older by at least five years.
Older than the documented X-5 program.
"Ain't this a bitch," the sentry says tiredly, and nudges Alec's chair with his boot. "All right, kid. You're human. Quit trying to slip the ropes so I can untie you."
"I." Alec stops. He doesn't stutter, because that kind of speech pathology is selected out of Manticore early, but he shuts up until he can figure out what to say.
"Yeah," the sentry says. He kneels by the chair, and Alec has an easy shot at putting him in a wheelchair for a while, but he doesn't. He doesn't, because there's no barcode on the back of the sentry's neck and no transgenic scent on his skin. He's human, fully human. His hands are quick and deft, slicing through the ropes and letting Alec loose. The sentry sits back on his heels, squints at Alec, then shakes his head. "You've got lousy timing."
It's hard to look at his face. Alec focuses on the crease between the sentry's eyebrows. This is not above his usual level of strange. Granted, this shit always seems to happen to Max. No wonder she's always cranky. "Who are you?" he asks, level.
"Dean Winchester. That's Bobby," the man in the hat, "and my brother Sam." The big guy, glancing back at forth between them, evaluating angles. Dean pushes up to his feet. "Who're you?"
Brothers. It hits Alec like a glitch in the matrix, a hiccup in his thoughts: if Dean didn't come from Manticore, what does he mean by brother? Why does he look at Sam like he's another soldier in his unit? Sam doesn't look like any transgenic Alec knows. Adopted? No, they look too much alike. They smell alike. They're blood.
None of this makes any sense.
Alec stands up, brushing off imaginary dust from the ropes. The blood is returning to his limbs. He's unhurt. "Nice to meet you," he says. "I'm--"
And he bolts.
There's a lag of two seconds, maybe three, long enough for Alec to grab the doorframe and use it for a sharp turn. He hits the screen door before he even hears Dean curse and start running, out into what looks like a junkyard. It's a good place to run, a better place to hide. Too bad about the man-sized dogs.
Alec doesn't waste time or air swearing. He puts on speed, tearing over the top of wrecked cars, sliding on his knees across the hood and landing on his feet. He sees the fence coming and vaults up the back of a truck, uses it as a ramp for airtime. Barbed wire tears the hell out of his shin but he makes it, he's over, he's into the dusty scrub-brush lands beyond the junkyard, and he keeps running.
****
It's getting darker when he finally stops, the fluorescent lights of the bar ahead casting neon auras on the ground. There's dust everywhere, in his hair and his mouth, and his ribs ache like he's wrapped too tight in plastic. He gives himself a minute of cool-down, then sits on the curb. The wound on his shin is knitted together, bound up with dust and sweat and blood. Alec spits in his hand and scrubs the blood away, revealing the unbroken skin beneath.
Well. With that annoying, yet disturbing interlude behind him, he can start looking for a way back to Seattle. Odds are Max is having a fit.
Alec stands and starts into the bar. Two things stop him short of the door.
First, there's the cherry Harley parked off by itself, just begging to be hotwired.
Second, the date on the newspaper by the exit: 2008.
Alec takes a moment to curse before he makes his exit. The bike comes with him.
****
They come back winded and empty-handed, no sign of the kid with Dean's face. All they've got is some bloody cloth Bobby pulled off the barbed wire. After a quick drive makes it clear that the kid isn't trying to hitchhike, or that he already got a ride, they adjourn to Bobby's kitchen for beer. Bobby magically finds somewhere else to be.
Dean drinks half his beer in one swig and stares at the table. Thinking. Probably feeling guilty, since that was Dean's default.
"You want to call Dad?" Sam asks finally.
"He might not be human." Dean thumbs the bottlecap, spinning it in idle circles as he talks. "He looks like me, but there's a few hundred things that wouldn't show up on Bobby's tests."
"Like?"
"I don't know! You're research boy." Dean exhales. "Shifter."
"Checked it."
"One of those spirit recordings."
"Too solid."
"Doppelganger."
"Extinct."
Dean snorts. "Yeah, like vampires?"
Sam shrugs. "We could call around and get somebody to hunt him." Even saying it is uncomfortable. "But I think... I think he's all right."
"Yeah? Like woo-woo psychic think?" Dean smirks, immune to Sam's glare, but it fades. "All right, so the other possibility is that there's been another Winchester just... running around for the last twenty years, and we didn't know about it."
"It wouldn't be the first thing Dad hid."
"Yeah, but this? Why aren't the demons all over him? Fuck, Sammy, Dad was paranoid about protecting you, and this kid looks younger--"
Dean stops. They both stop, staring at each other across the table.
The kid is too young to be Mary Winchester's. It's a stupid, obvious thing for them to have missed, but they missed it. But if he's a half-brother, why did he look so damn much like Dean?
Where did this kid come from?
"Yeah." Sam drags a hand through his hair, forcing himself to center down on the facts they have now and the road in front of them. "Bobby's got that blood from the fence. I'll see if I can rig up some way to track him. If not, we can ask around, find a psychic or something--"
"We could let him go," Dean says. When Sam stares at him, Dean's attention veers away to his clenched fists. "Sammy, we're in it deep. And we don't know."
We don't know if he's human. We don't know if he's ours.
Sam opens his mouth, ready to snap from some hurt place. If the kid isn't human, if he's in trouble, so what? Sam is less than human, and Dean wouldn't just let him run off. If the demons found the kid, or the feds...
Dean glances up, gaging Sam, and Sam realizes that Dean isn't suggesting. He's offering. He's saying he'll leave the kid if it means protecting Sam. Even if it'll kill Dean to wonder.
Fuck, Sam is tired of translating from Winchester.
"If he looked like me," Sam starts, then lets himself trail off. He knows what Dean's answer is, even if that's not what Dean'll say to Sam's face. "He's a Winchester. I'm going to look through Bobby's stacks for a way to find him."
He leaves Dean sitting at Bobby's table.
After a few minutes, Dean comes and picks up a book. Their knees bump, and Sam hides his smile.
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