DISCLAIMER: All characters belong to their respective creators.
ARCHIVE: No
The following short story is based on characters
created for the television series SUPERNATURAL & DARK ANGEL, and is set in an indeterminate time frame. -- author's note
“Well, what the hell was I supposed to do? You know as well as I do, if I’d stayed, she’d have died, just like Mom and Jessica!” Stoney silence met Dean’’s words. He waited a beat before adding, “Now listen up, Sammy, and listen up good. The only way Max and my son are gonna have a chance is if I stay outta their lives, and I don’t mean just keepin’ my distance from Seattle.” He rolled over on the double bed they were sharing and grabbed a wad of Sam’s dark maroon t-shirt in his hand, pulling the younger man so close their noses were almost touching. “It also means we don’t talk about ‘em, or even think about ‘em,” he said fiercely. “This thing that’s after our family always seems to be one step ahead of us, and that’s scarin’ the shit outta me.” Dean then let go of Sam’s shirt as abruptly as he’d taken hold of it, and reached around to plump the hotel room’s thin pillow before jamming it behind his head and falling back on the mattress with a heavy sigh of exasperation.
“And just how are you not going to think about the woman you love and your son?” Sam asked scathingly, refusing to drop the subject. He knew how much he’d loved Jessica, and if Dean’s feelings were anywhere near as intense for Max he just didn’t see how it was possible his brother was going to be able to “forget” she existed, let alone that little boy who looked so much like his father it was uncanny. “Whatever this evil thing is, it knows where our loved ones are,” he added.
“But it doesn’t strike unless we’re there to suffer,” Dean said as he stared up at the dark, slightly stained ceiling panels above. A car pulled into the hotel’s pothole filled lot outside, the bright bouncing beams shining through the curtain and making shadows dance on the wall. The X5’s eyes flicked to the window, caught the light, and for just a brief moment glowed green ... like a cat’s.
Sam noticed, and swallowed hard. Ever since Dean had told him about the things Manticore had done to him -- and especially since he’d seen firsthand the results of human/animal hybridization in Terminal City -- the younger man had wanted to ask questions ... questions that his brother might consider insulting. “You got plenty of that tryptophan stuff?” he asked quietly, changing the subject.
Dean turned his head and looked at him. “I’m five by five. Why’d you ask?”
“I just wanted to be sure you were okay,” Sam said rather lamely.
But Big Bro was too empathic to fall for that line. He rightly sensed that there was more. “Mole, Josh, and the others kind of threw ya, didn’t they?” the X5 said.
X5 ... Sam thought to himself. Dean wasn’t human. He was an X5, but what that implied he still wasn’t sure.
“Ask,” Dean said, his voice deep and low as he stared again at the ceiling. “Get it over with, Sammy.”
“You a mind reader now?” Sam laughed nervously. “How do you know I wanna ask something? Maybe I just wanna go to sleep.”
“Ask.” This time it was a command.
“Okay, I will,” Sam snapped. “Once, when I was maybe eight years old and you were what ... fourteen? I saw you have this ... fit. You started shaking all over and fell on the ground and your eyes rolled back in your head. It scared the shit outta me. Dad gave you something ... tryptophan I suppose or whatever your Manticore prescribed ... forced it down your throat ... and then you slept for nearly a day and when you woke up you were all right. He told me you had epilepsy, but that it was under control and I should never talk about it to anyone.”
“Dad was right,” Dean said quietly.
“But it wasn’t really epilepsy.”
“I mean how you shouldn’t talk about it.”
Sam flinched at the rebuke, but he wasn’t about to stop now. “Tell me, Dean. Tell me what they did to you, back at Manticore.”
Dean turned over on his side and regarded his younger brother quizzically, a cynical smile playing on full lips, his handsome features illuminated by the parking lot lights shining through the thin curtain. “Tell you what they did to me?” he repeated. “Well, I would, Sammy. But I can’t. ‘Cause you wouldn’t understand. You can’t imagine what it’s like growin’ up bein’ constantly told that you aren’t human ... that you’re military property ... that you belong to the government and your only purpose in life is to serve your superior officers. You can’t imagine bein’ ordered to kill someone when you’re only twelve years old, or bein’ ordered to slaughter the girl you love to prove your loyalty. And most of all you can’t imagine how it feels when you actually carry out those orders ... and then bein’ told that you shouldn’t feel bad about it ‘cause it’s what you were created for -- to be an assassin ... a genetically engineered killing machine. And most of all you can’t imagine the kind of pain they put me through when I tried to fight what they were doin’ to me. I’m talkin’ real torture here, Sammy. The kind that tears up your body and where there’s lots of blood. But ya see, us X5s heal real fast so there were never any scars to show Dad. They saw to that ... that I was always all healed before I went home for one of my visits.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said softly, appalled in more ways than one at the horrific picture his brother was painting ... the “other” life his sibling had led during the times he wasn’t with his family. “Dean, I had no idea. If I had I’d have--”
“What?” Dean scoffed. “Rescued me? You were just a kid, Sammy. A baby ...”
“Why’d Dad let them do that to you? I mean, you told him, didn’t you? What Manticore was doing to you and the other kids?”
“I never said a word,” Dean replied levelly. “If I had, they’d have killed him ... you too. That was made perfectly clear to me by the Colonel before each and every one of my little outside trips.”
“But Dad was a Manticore guard. Didn’t he see what was going on?”
“He was a periphery guard for awhile, then after I was born he was reassigned to another base,” Dean said. “Lydecker didn’t want Dad hangin’ around tryin’ to get his son special favors or anything.”
“Why’d they let you visit your family at all?” Sam wondered.
“I don’t know,” Dean said. “I used to ask myself that, but Dad would never talk about it ... still won’t in fact. If I had to guess, I’d say he had somethin’ to hold over one of the higher ups at Manticore ... maybe even Lydecker himself.”
“Blackmail?”
Dean shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe it was all part of an experiment on Manticore’s part ... see if one of their human/feline hybrids would adapt better to society if the kid had a touch of a normal upbringing along with the military brainwashing.” He regarded his brother steadily ... unflinchingly. “They wanted me to be able to fit in ... so I’d be a better assassin. That was the plan all along.”
“You said they made you kill a girl you loved?” Sam tried.
“Don’t go there!” Dean said harshly. “Don’t ever go there!”
“All right,” Sam said gently, placing a hand on his brother’s bare forearm and giving it a reassuring squeeze. “I’m simply tryin’ to understand more about you. All the time we were growin’ up, I just thought you were this smart-ass older brother. Nothin’ ever phased you, man. And the way you could fight ...”
Dean smiled a little at the memory. “Yeah, Dad did help me out there. Manticore taught me all about martial arts and modern weapons, but they were a bit remiss on broad sword technique. Guess you could say Dad saw to it that I had a well-rounded education.”
“You always could beat the crap outta me in our sparring sessions.”
“Still can,” Dean said smugly. “But then I s’pose all that kitty-cat DNA gives me a bit of an advantage.”
“Yeah,” Sam said cautiously. “About the whole DNA thing ...”
“I told you,” Dean said a bit coldly. “I’m mostly human ... 98 percent or so, and most of that’s from Dad and Mom.”
“Most?”
Dean shrugged in the dark. “Manticore added a little of this and a little of that to make all of us X5s compatible with each other -- blood type and tissue and all that stuff in case we needed to be donors on the battlefield.”
Sam shuddered slightly. “You mean you were designed so they could swap body parts?”
“Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.” Dean said quietly. “Max once needed a heart transplant. She’s alive today ‘cause another X5 was a compatible donor.”
“I thought we weren’t going to mention her name.”
“We’re not.”
“Oh.” Sam stayed silent for a moment, listening to the rain that was starting up outside as it pattered on the run-down motel’s cheap tin roof. “What else did they add?” he had to ask ... pushing when he knew he probably shouldn’t.
“You mean to my DNA cocktail?” Dean said. “You’re not gonna quit chewin’ on this, are ya Sammy?”
“No.”
A very heavy sigh from Dean. Then, “They upped my I.Q. -- or so I’m told -- plus supposedly enhanced my looks.” A wry grin. “Made me pretty. Then there’s the whole feline X5 package that fucked my brain chemistry up so bad.”
“What’s your I.Q.?”
“What’s yours?”
“139,” Sam said without hesitation, and with more than a hint of pride in his voice. He had, after all, aced his LSATs -- not a mean feat.”
“156,” Dean shot back. “Or so I’ve been told.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Sorry you’re not the only genius in the family, Sammy?”
“I always knew you were smart,” Sam said. “You just don’t always use your brains.”
“Very funny. You wanna know what I really am?” he said quietly. “What I can do?”
“Yeah. I’d like the mystery gone,” Sam said, meaning it. “I’m tired of not knowing who my brother really is.”
“I’m exactly who you think I am,” Dean said. “No different from the kid you grew up with.”
“The kid I only got to see on holidays and for a couple of weeks each summer,” Sam pointed out. “Manticore -- or rather ‘military school’ as Dad called it -- kept you on a tight leash.”
“Still,” Dean said. “We were always brothers. We always we knew we had each other out there somewhere.”
“And that meant a lot to you, even though you had ... have ... your Manticore family?”
“It’s what kept me sane,” Dean said simply. “Knowin’ that Lydecker and his guards weren’t the only humans in the world ... that there was someone out there who cared about me -- not because I was a multimillion dollar bioweapons system, but because I was their son.”
“But you couldn’t just leave?” Sam said. “Run away?”
“I told you why I couldn’t,” Dean reminded him. “Manticore had a very long reach back then, Sammy. They’d have tracked us all down. I’d have been body parts, and you and Dad would've just been bodies.”
“And now?”
“Now ... so long as I’m careful I think we’re all right. Yeah, Max says New Manticore wants me back, but they’ve got no way of trackin’ me. I’ve just gotta be careful ... not go all transgenic out in public or get the police suspicious. Keep my bar code under wraps or lasered off. X5s can pass as human pretty easily when we want to.”
“You are human, to quote your own words. Or at least mostly.”
Dean blinked, then grinned. “No,” he said softly. “Truth is, I’m not human.”
“Then what are you?”
“Better.”
Sam grinned back in the dark. That sounded more like the old Dean he remembered from childhood. “So,” he said. “What do we do now?”
Dean’s brows drew down, as if that was a stupid question. “We sleep,” he said simply before rolling back over and plumping the pillow again. “Then we find Dad before it finds us.”
