![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Supernatural: Thicker Than Water (SPN Genderswitch AU)
Title: Thicker Than Water
Rating: PG, gen
Word Count: 2100
Summary: Dean has few certainties in her life, but her sister Samantha is one of them.
Notes: This is the same SPN genderswitch AU as Crossroads, a universe in which Sam and Dean are sisters, and John died in the house fire rather than Mary. Since the timeline more or less follows the series, this takes place about a year before the other story, during what would be the episode Bloodlust. In this reality, the end of Season 1 and In My Time of Dying never happened, as John and Mary have both been dead for years.
There's a dead cat in the alley, a sodden lump of colorless fur lying in a greasy puddle that reeks of urine. Dean sees it, steps around, but Sam's too busy looking over her shoulder, and sets her foot right on its back with a solid, wet squish. She recoils, mouth starting to open. Dean slaps her shoulder, hard, and glares at her until Sam's full lips snap shut. You let me do that on purpose, Sam's sullen glower says, and Dean glares right back at her: Don't blow our position, Sammy.
Lip curled, Sam shakes dead cat guts off her foot as they flatten themselves against the slimy brick wall. The alley behind the bar isn't as nasty as some places Dean's been, but she still breathes through her mouth, trying to ignore the stink of rotting garbage and stale vomit. A misty rain dampens her short hair.
Sam's breath puffs softly against Dean's ear. "If he doesn't show up in the next thirty seconds, I'm going to --"
"Shut up, Sammy." Dean can barely hear her own words, but Sam fades softly back into the night as a long shadow stretches across the alley, merging and melting into the pool of darkness that conceals them.
It's familiar, too familiar -- that long shadow, and the stealthy figure who casts it, who follows it into the alley. Dean hasn't been able to get a good look at their tail, but the sense of familiarity nags at her: the catlike way he moves, the graceful turn of his head. She still can't see his face -- but he's past them now, before she can make out more than vague impressions: short hair, angular planes of a face so familiar she could scream. Flat against the wall, she sees him pause, his back to them, realizing that the alley is a dead end. He starts to turn. At this angle, his eyes adjusting to the shadows, he can't help but see them.
Dean moves, with Sam just a split second slower. Like they'd planned it, moving in sync without words, they're on him -- Dean with her knife at his throat, Sammy knotting her fists in his jacket, all five feet ten inches of her bearing him to the brick wall of the alley.
"Dorothy Jean," Gordon says, and he smiles, just a flicker, there and gone. "Still remember some of the things I taught you, I see."
Dean draws a quick breath and eases the knife down. Sam's a little slower, letting go, and Dean doesn't miss the look that Gordon gives Sammy before his eyes return to her. She can feel him taking her in, reading the marks of the years on her.
She studies him the same. In the harsh glare of the streetlight at the alley's mouth, he's older, but no softer. Her eyes play tricks, try to tell her he's shorter than he used to be, but she knows it's only because she's put on an inch or two since she last saw him.
"It's a good way to get some new holes, you go following us into alleys, Gordon." Flipping the knife around in her hand, showing off a bit, she slides it into the sheath hanging from the waistband of her jeans. "Why didn't you just say hi?"
"I wasn't sure it was you two. It's been a while." He starts to look at Sam; then his gaze slides away, circumspect in a way Dean doesn't like. "Buy you girls a drink. Catch up on old times."
"Sure," Sammy says, her eyes never leaving Gordon.
The beer in the dive bar is just as cheap and lousy as it was when Dean bought himself and Sam a round, half an hour ago. Dean asks for a whisky with hers, straight up: a pleasant burn chasing down the watery Coors Light. Sam rolls her own bottle between her hands, and barely wets her lips.
"Heard you girls hooked up with Ellen and Bobby," Gordon says. "The Roadhouse crowd." His mouth twists and he drains his beer, flicks two fingers at the bartender and then at Dean's whisky.
Dean decides not to ask where he heard that. There's no love lost between Gordon and the Roadhouse bunch, and that's all she knows and all she wants to know. She owes Ellen and Bobby a lot; she also owes Gordon more than she wants to. "Where've you been?" she asks, rather than answering.
"Around. Doing what I do. Got a few less bloodsuckers crawling around in the world; I call it work well done."
Dean just nods. She lived with Gordon for three years; "obsessed" is too polite a word for what he is.
Bobby's words were a lot less polite than that. He never believed that Gordon didn't lay a hand on them. And Dean didn't have the words to tell them that Gordon saved her from that -- a steady round of truck stops and motels, of petty theft and even pettier things that she has no words for, the things she did to keep herself and Sammy alive after Mom died. Things she hopes Sammy doesn't know about, never finds out about.
No, Gordon wasn't like that. What he got out of taking in two orphans with half-assed Hunter training, Dean doesn't know. She sometimes wonders, but she's pretty sure she'll never know for certain. All she knows is why she left.
As if on cue, Sammy, who hasn't said a word throughout the conversation, excuses herself to go to the ladies' room. Gordon watches her go. Any other guy would be checking out her ass -- in fact, Dean sees the bartender take a quick peek -- but Gordon's got the same cool, appraising stare that he always used to use, back in the old days, to size up a situation he's not quite sure about.
"You didn't take my advice, Dorothy Jean."
Two beers and a shot and a half of whisky sit uneasy in her empty stomach. "Didn't like your advice," she says.
Gordon lights a cigarette. Smoke curls around his face, and it's the smell that drives the knife into Dean's chest and twists. It's the damned smell that calls her back to afternoons in fields, in vacant lots, on the sides of lonely country roads -- sunlight slanting on her shoulders as Gordon's deft hands guided her through the motions that Dad had started teaching her, that Mom had carried on but never finished. Learning to break down and reload a dozen different kinds of guns, learning crude protection circles and more things to do with salt and holy water than Mom had dreamed of. He'd smoke steadily as he taught her the things he knew, lighting one Marlboro from the butt of another -- smoke curling up in the cold November sunshine, weaving itself into the fabric of those damn ugly plaid shirts he wore. The big, warm, callused hands on her own smaller ones brought back vague, half-forgotten memories of Dad, but the smell, as she leaned back against Gordon's chest while he helped her sight in the rifles, is something she can't forget.
It makes her remember the feeling of being safe for the first time in years, when she thought she'd never feel safe again.
But his words drive the knife to the hilt, and cut out the core of her, as they did ten years ago.
"That girl, that sister of yours -- she's not right. I warned you, Dean."
It's one of the few times he's called her by the nickname she prefers. "I remember," Dean says. "Told you to go to hell, as I recall."
"That's where you're going, if you stick with her." Gordon draws slowly on the cigarette, an amber glow in the bar's dim lights. "Straight to hell."
Dean curls a quick hand around her beer. The whisky's warm glow has poured into her limbs, making her loose and reckless. "You got any evidence, Gordon? So, is Sammy planning to murder me in my sleep? Biding her time all these years? Must be some plan she's got. Care to let me in on it?"
"It's not anything she's done." Gordon doesn't avoid Dean's gaze; his eyes are unyielding iron. "It's what she is, Dorothy -- Dean. I've been hearing things since you two ran off. Seeing signs --"
He breaks off as Sam picks her way back towards them through the close-packed tables. She sits down and glances between the two of them, with a nervous little sideways grin that doesn't quite make it to her eyes. "I feel like I walked in on the punch line of a joke."
Dean doesn't answer. Gordon clears his throat. "So, I guess you girls already know there's a nest of vampires in this town. Can't figure out any other reason you'd be down this way."
Dean still doesn't say anything, and Sam eventually, reluctantly, picks up the slack in the conversation. "Yeah," she says finally, a bit defiantly.
"I was just thinking you two might want to team up." Gordon still won't look at Sammy, but he looks at Dean, and there's something there, under his usual cool stare. It hits her in places she thought she bricked up long ago. "You know. Old times' sake. We were a good team, once."
Sam gives Dean an uncertain look.
Dean drains the last of her beer, and stands up, snagging her jacket from the back of her chair. "Appreciate the offer, but me and Sammy, we're used to working just the two of us now. It'd be too hard to relearn old habits, you know?"
Gordon frowns, watching as she collects her jacket and Sam cautiously follows suit. She was prepared for anger, but his pain, his loneliness cuts her like a blade.
"We were a good team, Dorothy. Dean."
"I know." Dean slings her jacket around her shoulders, and doesn't let the hurt show. "Thanks for the drink. We'll have to buy you a round, one of these days."
"Yeah." There's something darker in Gordon's eyes now, and Dean turns away from it, and schools herself not to take possession of a past she can't have.
The rain's washed a lot of the stink from the air, and Dean's breath smokes in front of her as Sam follows her to the Impala through a soft drizzle. Neither of them speaks until the doors close, shutting them away from the incurious stares of the locals leaning on their pickup trucks.
"Okay, what was all that about, Dean?"
Dean twists the key and the big engine rumbles to life. "Don't know what you're talking about, Sammy girl."
Sam reaches over to block her hand when she reaches for the gearshift. "I'm talking about Gordon Walker. What's the deal with the two of you? What did he do, Dean?"
"The man bought us a beer, Sam."
Sam's fist leaves a dent in her shoulder. "You know what I mean. Back then, all those years ago. There was a reason we left, Dean. I don't think he ever liked me, but you and Gordon ..." Her voice trails off briefly, in the grip of old jealousies long buried under a fragile veneer of adulthood. "What did he do, Dean?" she asks again after a moment.
"Nothing," Dean says, remembering the way Gordon used to watch Sam in those days -- speculative, waiting: for what, she didn't want to know. She remembers lying curled up in a motel bed, watching Gordon under half-lowered eyelids as he, in turn, watched Sammy sleep, one of his hands resting lightly on the hilt of a razor-sharp knife.
She remembers waiting until he left to Hunt, left them alone ... remembers throwing clothes in a grocery bag, taking the spare gun from under his bed and curling her own fingers around Sammy's and leaving behind the closest thing to a home they had, because some things are more important than home and safety.
"Nothing," she says again, more firmly. "He didn't do anything." He didn't have a chance.
And I won't give him one.
She throws the Impala into gear, and peels out of the parking lot. She can't see Gordon through the iron grille on the bar's small window, but she can feel him watching anyway, even as the miles widen once again between them.
I've been hearing things since you two ran out. Seeing signs.
Sam stares out the rain-washed window, saying nothing. Dean pops AC/DC into the tape deck, and feels her heart pound in time with the beat of Highway to Hell, driving the doubts from her mind as the Impala's big engine eats up the road.
Rating: PG, gen
Word Count: 2100
Summary: Dean has few certainties in her life, but her sister Samantha is one of them.
Notes: This is the same SPN genderswitch AU as Crossroads, a universe in which Sam and Dean are sisters, and John died in the house fire rather than Mary. Since the timeline more or less follows the series, this takes place about a year before the other story, during what would be the episode Bloodlust. In this reality, the end of Season 1 and In My Time of Dying never happened, as John and Mary have both been dead for years.
There's a dead cat in the alley, a sodden lump of colorless fur lying in a greasy puddle that reeks of urine. Dean sees it, steps around, but Sam's too busy looking over her shoulder, and sets her foot right on its back with a solid, wet squish. She recoils, mouth starting to open. Dean slaps her shoulder, hard, and glares at her until Sam's full lips snap shut. You let me do that on purpose, Sam's sullen glower says, and Dean glares right back at her: Don't blow our position, Sammy.
Lip curled, Sam shakes dead cat guts off her foot as they flatten themselves against the slimy brick wall. The alley behind the bar isn't as nasty as some places Dean's been, but she still breathes through her mouth, trying to ignore the stink of rotting garbage and stale vomit. A misty rain dampens her short hair.
Sam's breath puffs softly against Dean's ear. "If he doesn't show up in the next thirty seconds, I'm going to --"
"Shut up, Sammy." Dean can barely hear her own words, but Sam fades softly back into the night as a long shadow stretches across the alley, merging and melting into the pool of darkness that conceals them.
It's familiar, too familiar -- that long shadow, and the stealthy figure who casts it, who follows it into the alley. Dean hasn't been able to get a good look at their tail, but the sense of familiarity nags at her: the catlike way he moves, the graceful turn of his head. She still can't see his face -- but he's past them now, before she can make out more than vague impressions: short hair, angular planes of a face so familiar she could scream. Flat against the wall, she sees him pause, his back to them, realizing that the alley is a dead end. He starts to turn. At this angle, his eyes adjusting to the shadows, he can't help but see them.
Dean moves, with Sam just a split second slower. Like they'd planned it, moving in sync without words, they're on him -- Dean with her knife at his throat, Sammy knotting her fists in his jacket, all five feet ten inches of her bearing him to the brick wall of the alley.
"Dorothy Jean," Gordon says, and he smiles, just a flicker, there and gone. "Still remember some of the things I taught you, I see."
Dean draws a quick breath and eases the knife down. Sam's a little slower, letting go, and Dean doesn't miss the look that Gordon gives Sammy before his eyes return to her. She can feel him taking her in, reading the marks of the years on her.
She studies him the same. In the harsh glare of the streetlight at the alley's mouth, he's older, but no softer. Her eyes play tricks, try to tell her he's shorter than he used to be, but she knows it's only because she's put on an inch or two since she last saw him.
"It's a good way to get some new holes, you go following us into alleys, Gordon." Flipping the knife around in her hand, showing off a bit, she slides it into the sheath hanging from the waistband of her jeans. "Why didn't you just say hi?"
"I wasn't sure it was you two. It's been a while." He starts to look at Sam; then his gaze slides away, circumspect in a way Dean doesn't like. "Buy you girls a drink. Catch up on old times."
"Sure," Sammy says, her eyes never leaving Gordon.
The beer in the dive bar is just as cheap and lousy as it was when Dean bought himself and Sam a round, half an hour ago. Dean asks for a whisky with hers, straight up: a pleasant burn chasing down the watery Coors Light. Sam rolls her own bottle between her hands, and barely wets her lips.
"Heard you girls hooked up with Ellen and Bobby," Gordon says. "The Roadhouse crowd." His mouth twists and he drains his beer, flicks two fingers at the bartender and then at Dean's whisky.
Dean decides not to ask where he heard that. There's no love lost between Gordon and the Roadhouse bunch, and that's all she knows and all she wants to know. She owes Ellen and Bobby a lot; she also owes Gordon more than she wants to. "Where've you been?" she asks, rather than answering.
"Around. Doing what I do. Got a few less bloodsuckers crawling around in the world; I call it work well done."
Dean just nods. She lived with Gordon for three years; "obsessed" is too polite a word for what he is.
Bobby's words were a lot less polite than that. He never believed that Gordon didn't lay a hand on them. And Dean didn't have the words to tell them that Gordon saved her from that -- a steady round of truck stops and motels, of petty theft and even pettier things that she has no words for, the things she did to keep herself and Sammy alive after Mom died. Things she hopes Sammy doesn't know about, never finds out about.
No, Gordon wasn't like that. What he got out of taking in two orphans with half-assed Hunter training, Dean doesn't know. She sometimes wonders, but she's pretty sure she'll never know for certain. All she knows is why she left.
As if on cue, Sammy, who hasn't said a word throughout the conversation, excuses herself to go to the ladies' room. Gordon watches her go. Any other guy would be checking out her ass -- in fact, Dean sees the bartender take a quick peek -- but Gordon's got the same cool, appraising stare that he always used to use, back in the old days, to size up a situation he's not quite sure about.
"You didn't take my advice, Dorothy Jean."
Two beers and a shot and a half of whisky sit uneasy in her empty stomach. "Didn't like your advice," she says.
Gordon lights a cigarette. Smoke curls around his face, and it's the smell that drives the knife into Dean's chest and twists. It's the damned smell that calls her back to afternoons in fields, in vacant lots, on the sides of lonely country roads -- sunlight slanting on her shoulders as Gordon's deft hands guided her through the motions that Dad had started teaching her, that Mom had carried on but never finished. Learning to break down and reload a dozen different kinds of guns, learning crude protection circles and more things to do with salt and holy water than Mom had dreamed of. He'd smoke steadily as he taught her the things he knew, lighting one Marlboro from the butt of another -- smoke curling up in the cold November sunshine, weaving itself into the fabric of those damn ugly plaid shirts he wore. The big, warm, callused hands on her own smaller ones brought back vague, half-forgotten memories of Dad, but the smell, as she leaned back against Gordon's chest while he helped her sight in the rifles, is something she can't forget.
It makes her remember the feeling of being safe for the first time in years, when she thought she'd never feel safe again.
But his words drive the knife to the hilt, and cut out the core of her, as they did ten years ago.
"That girl, that sister of yours -- she's not right. I warned you, Dean."
It's one of the few times he's called her by the nickname she prefers. "I remember," Dean says. "Told you to go to hell, as I recall."
"That's where you're going, if you stick with her." Gordon draws slowly on the cigarette, an amber glow in the bar's dim lights. "Straight to hell."
Dean curls a quick hand around her beer. The whisky's warm glow has poured into her limbs, making her loose and reckless. "You got any evidence, Gordon? So, is Sammy planning to murder me in my sleep? Biding her time all these years? Must be some plan she's got. Care to let me in on it?"
"It's not anything she's done." Gordon doesn't avoid Dean's gaze; his eyes are unyielding iron. "It's what she is, Dorothy -- Dean. I've been hearing things since you two ran off. Seeing signs --"
He breaks off as Sam picks her way back towards them through the close-packed tables. She sits down and glances between the two of them, with a nervous little sideways grin that doesn't quite make it to her eyes. "I feel like I walked in on the punch line of a joke."
Dean doesn't answer. Gordon clears his throat. "So, I guess you girls already know there's a nest of vampires in this town. Can't figure out any other reason you'd be down this way."
Dean still doesn't say anything, and Sam eventually, reluctantly, picks up the slack in the conversation. "Yeah," she says finally, a bit defiantly.
"I was just thinking you two might want to team up." Gordon still won't look at Sammy, but he looks at Dean, and there's something there, under his usual cool stare. It hits her in places she thought she bricked up long ago. "You know. Old times' sake. We were a good team, once."
Sam gives Dean an uncertain look.
Dean drains the last of her beer, and stands up, snagging her jacket from the back of her chair. "Appreciate the offer, but me and Sammy, we're used to working just the two of us now. It'd be too hard to relearn old habits, you know?"
Gordon frowns, watching as she collects her jacket and Sam cautiously follows suit. She was prepared for anger, but his pain, his loneliness cuts her like a blade.
"We were a good team, Dorothy. Dean."
"I know." Dean slings her jacket around her shoulders, and doesn't let the hurt show. "Thanks for the drink. We'll have to buy you a round, one of these days."
"Yeah." There's something darker in Gordon's eyes now, and Dean turns away from it, and schools herself not to take possession of a past she can't have.
The rain's washed a lot of the stink from the air, and Dean's breath smokes in front of her as Sam follows her to the Impala through a soft drizzle. Neither of them speaks until the doors close, shutting them away from the incurious stares of the locals leaning on their pickup trucks.
"Okay, what was all that about, Dean?"
Dean twists the key and the big engine rumbles to life. "Don't know what you're talking about, Sammy girl."
Sam reaches over to block her hand when she reaches for the gearshift. "I'm talking about Gordon Walker. What's the deal with the two of you? What did he do, Dean?"
"The man bought us a beer, Sam."
Sam's fist leaves a dent in her shoulder. "You know what I mean. Back then, all those years ago. There was a reason we left, Dean. I don't think he ever liked me, but you and Gordon ..." Her voice trails off briefly, in the grip of old jealousies long buried under a fragile veneer of adulthood. "What did he do, Dean?" she asks again after a moment.
"Nothing," Dean says, remembering the way Gordon used to watch Sam in those days -- speculative, waiting: for what, she didn't want to know. She remembers lying curled up in a motel bed, watching Gordon under half-lowered eyelids as he, in turn, watched Sammy sleep, one of his hands resting lightly on the hilt of a razor-sharp knife.
She remembers waiting until he left to Hunt, left them alone ... remembers throwing clothes in a grocery bag, taking the spare gun from under his bed and curling her own fingers around Sammy's and leaving behind the closest thing to a home they had, because some things are more important than home and safety.
"Nothing," she says again, more firmly. "He didn't do anything." He didn't have a chance.
And I won't give him one.
She throws the Impala into gear, and peels out of the parking lot. She can't see Gordon through the iron grille on the bar's small window, but she can feel him watching anyway, even as the miles widen once again between them.
I've been hearing things since you two ran out. Seeing signs.
Sam stares out the rain-washed window, saying nothing. Dean pops AC/DC into the tape deck, and feels her heart pound in time with the beat of Highway to Hell, driving the doubts from her mind as the Impala's big engine eats up the road.
no subject
Reimagining the Winchesters as sisters - Dean becoming a hunter through Gordon, not his dad... I love it, at the same time as it's unsettling. Especially since Gordon is still Gordon, and Sam is still Sam, and there are few universes where that can end well.
no subject
I think it's funny how much I enjoy playing in this 'verse. Most of the same things happen, they just happen differently and in a somewhat different order. Gordon's role is probably the most different, because he's Dean's mentor and yet, as you said, it really can't end well.
it's like the first season of the show was, always so rich in shadows and layers of half truths and doubt.
While I didn't do it on purpose *g* I admit that I was fonder of the show's tone in the first season than I have been since. I'm glad that they shake things up and don't stay the same, but I really fell for that shadow-world feeling of the first season, with John a distant mysterious figure pulling the strings, and the demon a great unknown, and Sam and Dean feeling their way through a huge and hostile world. I have really loved some of the episodes that have come after, but it's never quite recaptured that mystery-horror-road-trip feeling of the early episodes.
no subject
no subject
no subject