![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
WIP Amnesty: XMFC, SW&tH, SPN
XMFC space assassin AU
I have a vague memory that this started as a dream, but then I wrote the opening scene and had nothing else.
He opened his eyes to a wide expanse of stars, and knew he was supposed to kill someone.
He was clinging to the surface of a ship, the metal thick and curving under his hand. He moved himself along to the nearest airlock – slowly at first, stiff from being still in the pervasive cold, then smoothly gliding across the metal, keeping a firm grip on the surface.
At the airlock, he laid a hand over the access panel. This was always the trickiest part – disconnecting the monitoring system, then coaxing the right connections into place until the outer door unsealed and he could slip inside. The inner door was easier – same system as the first, with less security – and he cycled the lock and was inside in less than a minute. He pulled off his helmet and the thick insulated gloves and stashed them behind a storage locker. It was a good entry point: a cargo bay with lots of containers, but the lights were dimmed and no one visible. He knew where to go from here.
He paced silently down the curving hallways, alert for the sound of someone waking from their sleep cycle. The ship's corridors were mostly utilitarian, with the occasional aesthetic arc to an bulkhead and some decorative patterning on the deckplates. He found the door he wanted and pushed the lock until it slid open with only the quietest hiss of compressed air, then closed it behind him.
His target was sleeping, brown hair spilled over his pillow and hands lying peacefully on the clean white sheets.
He pulled a strip of metal from the pocket of his pressure suit. It was frigid from his long wait in the vacuum, but it warmed in his palm, stretched itself into a familiar shape – a point and edges, a hilt. The metal was familiar, too, but not pure – stray molecules of iron and copper mixed with the steel.
Old blood, he realized, the knife floating fully formed from his palm, already moving towards the man in the bed. His breath came short – he didn't want to do this, not again, no-
Agony flared up his spine and his mouth opened on a cry of pain, but no sound came out – he was supposed to be silent, no one can know you were there and he clawed at the strip of metal in his neck, choking on the feeling of it under his skin wrong wrong can't touch it no
The pain receded. The knife was moving towards the bed again, and he couldn't stop it, he was doing it, and he didn't want to no no no no-
He dug his fingers into his neck and screamed in his mind, red hot spikes of agony washing away his resistance bit by bit.
The knife was quivering in the air, so close now and
the man's eyes were open and he was
Charles let his hand drop away from his temple as the strange man in black collapsed to the floor. Something thumped to the bed next to his hand and he flinched away, adrenaline still rocketing through his body. He blinked away the haze of sleep that remained, and looked down at the object.
It was a knife. The man had just tried to kill him. He was an assassin.
He sat bolt upright – oh god, what if there were more? Charles clambered out of bed, already reaching across the ship with his mind. No foreign minds except the assassin; Raven and Hank were sleeping peacefully. Charles woke them with a thought and called them to his room, his attention already returning the man at his feet.
Charles knelt and brushed the man's mind with his own – unconscious, but not dead or comatose, thank god; his reaction had been so instinctive that he hadn't controlled its strength at all. The man had hit the floor fairly hard, so he let his hands automatically run through first aid checks – skull intact, no cervical damage, pupils even.
He felt for a pulse, and his fingers came away sticky with blood.
“Lights, on full,” he snapped, and tugged down the connector ring on the man's suit to get a better look.
Deep gouges ran around the base of the man's neck, bleeding sluggishly into the collar of suit liner: four parallel stripes, and a mess of crescent-shaped cuts. Fingernail marks, he thought, disconcerted. A check of the man's hands confirmed it – blood under his fingernails, and a ragged bleeding edge where one had ripped off down to the skin.
Charles sat back on his heels. There was something very strange going on. The assassin was wearing a pressure suit with the helmet removed, very high tech and not truly black, but made of some light-absorbing material that would probably render him nearly invisible in space. They had been out of dock from about a day and a half, now - how had he not felt him on the ship, or outside of it? His first awareness of the man had been the burst of pain that woke him, but appeared to have been self-inflicted, which didn't make any sense: how could someone have enough control to hide out on a spaceship with the intent to kill for over 36 hours, with a telepath onboard, only to claw himself bloody at the crucial moment? As a diagnosis, insanity didn't quite fit with the level of planning, but it would dangerous to check – he would need to go quite far down, with the man so deeply unconscious. He bit his lip, and gently sank into the man's mind.
What he found there nauseated him. The man's mind was shockingly vibrant - orderly and richly textured, sharp with intelligence – but huge swathes of memory had been blocked off and everything was steeped in bright rage and old pain, weighed down by despair. There were streaks of wrongness pulling the fine architecture of his thoughts awry, and Charles recoiled in horror.
“Charles, what are you – oh my god.”
He looked up to see his sister standing in the doorway, Hank gaping over her shoulder. “Raven,” he said, struggling for calm after the wreck of the man's mind. “Sorry, I didn't explain. Someone just tried to assassinate me. I woke up, luckily, and knocked him out.”
Raven flung herself across the room and wrapped her arms around him. He clung back, reassured by the steady, familiar warmth of her mind as much as her touch. “I'm fine,” he said, to her unspoken thoughts. “He didn't hurt me.”
Hank came over and put a tentative hand on Charles' shoulder. “Can you tell who sent him?”
Charles pulled away from Raven slightly and tilted his head up to look at Hank. “Well, there's a problem with that,” he said. “He doesn't know.”
“What? How can he not know who hired him?” Raven protested.
“I don't think he's a hired killer, Raven. Someone – a telepath – has put extensive memory blocks in his mind, and he's wearing a control collar.” He felt a wave of revulsion from Hank, whose own experience with one had been thankfully brief, but still scarring. “He was fighting it – that's what woke me up.”
“Jesus, I didn't think you could resist one of those,” Raven said, reaching out for Hank's hand and squeezing. She didn't have to be a telepath to know Hank needed the comfort.
“Not without a lot of pain,” Hank said quietly. “And not for long, not without the risk of neural damage.” He blinked rapidly, and Charles could feel his thoughts shifting into problem-solving mode, pushing the painful memories aside. “I can deactivate the mechanism, but removal will take surgical equipment we don't have on the ship. Most models are hooked into the cranial nerves, but I've seen a few that were directly linked to the cerebellum, and removing that could kill him.”
“Thank you, Hank,” Charles said. “We'll have to move him to the infirmary.”
Hank nodded jerkily. “I'll grab a grav unit,” he said, and ducked into the hallway.
Raven leaned against Charles' shoulder again. “Charles, we need to know who sent him,” she said. “What if they try again?”
“I know, darling,” he said, tilting his head against hers. “I might be able to remove the blocks, but it could take weeks. And I....” he trailed off, examining the man's face. He hadn't given it the time, before. The man was pale and drawn, ill-looking; his pressure suit was skintight across lean muscle, but he was almost painfully thin otherwise. Someone had driven him to the limit of his resources, both mentally and physically, and Charles wouldn't add to that. “I'll have to ask him for permission, first. He might not want to know, and I owe him the choice.”
“And I'm afraid I don't know your name.”
“Neither do I,” he said roughly.
Snow White & the Huntsman
Wow, I have...no memory of writing this. Apparently I liked the movie enough to want to write fic, which must have lasted all of a week. Warnings for...overly poetic and euphemistic cunnilingus?
She held court in the yard under the apple tree, and spent as much time as she could outside, until the pale white of her skin softened into pink and brown. In the early days, the sun painted red across her cheeks and nose, and along the crest of her shoulders, but they faded into freckles as the weeks went by.
He often wished he could trace his fingers where the sun had touched her, follow the warm lines of her skin out of sight. He settled for offering his arm when she rose from her chair, and kissing her hand when he knelt for her.
She argues with William constantly, just as when they were children. It’s frustrating, but she prefers it to the times when guilt washes over his face and he ceases to argue at all. Those tainted victories are truly losses - not just of valuable counsel, but of the friend she remembers.
More privately, she dreams of William’s lips turning hard under hers, the salt of his skin turning tart and the apple choking her to death, and hates that Ravenna’s poison will not leach from this as it does from the land. The hills grow green around her, but she is still a rose growing in the snow.
[Time to build a fire.]
The Huntsman stays at court, though he refuses to wear court dress. Snow cannot blame him, for she grew up with the things and is still constantly uncomfortable.
“You are more powerful than she was,” he said. “She cut out the hearts she wanted and threw away the rest, but we offer ours to you freely.”
She smiled at him. “It seems true hearts come with loud voices, and not all of them as wise as they think themselves.”
For a moment, she felt exposed, open and vulnerable - but then his hands cupped her waist, gentle and rough against her skin, and his mouth surrounded her, his tongue inside her, and she buried her hands in the warm brown of his hair.
She rose up against the heat of his mouth, again and again, until the heat spread through her like sunshine and, trembling, she fell.
“They say that our actions are a mirror of who we are, but mirrors only show us parts of ourselves. But you have always been the same man. I think that battle showed you things that made you turn away, and your wife showed you the best things. When you lost her, you could not believe in that part anymore.” She stroked a thumb over the curve of his cheek. “When you found me, you were a good man who was tempted to do a bad thing in the name of love, and still you stopped yourself. You are a survivor, but you used those skills to protect and teach me. You are an honest man who does not speak as much as you should. You say that I brought you back to your life, but I know that you brought me back as well.”
He startled under her fingers, and she brought up her other hand to cup his face in her palms. She said, “I woke up alone, but there were tears that were not mine on my face, and an empty bottle of spirits on the floor. I could still taste it on my lips. You saved me.”
I learned because I lived in the dark for so long.
You deserve to be more than reflection.
“I'll watch over her.”
“She doesn't need you to protect her; she needs you to trust her.”
SPN post-S5 coda
I think I wrote this scene of Dean unpacking his duffel bag at Lisa's right after the S5 finale, and then never a) posted it or b) watched the S6 premiere. So, you know, caveat lector. Prettty sure it's been jossed.
Dean wakes up with a start, his shirt soaked through and Sam's name trapped behind his clenched teeth.
Thank G-... thankfully, he hadn't screamed.
Morning light is streaming warm and cheerful through the windows of Lisa's spare bedroom, but the nightmare lingers anyway. He goes to the bathroom, washes away the sweat and the screams and the sound of knives, and doesn't look in the mirror.
On the way back to bed, he stumbles over his duffel, tossed carelessly on the floor last night. He'd gotten just drunk enough at dinner to fall asleep easy, but not enough to worry Lisa. She'd offered her guest room before he could even make a joke about sleeping on the couch. Her smile had been warm, hopeful, and Dean had known that he could do this, that he could keep his promise to Sam and Lisa would be happy, too.
He pulls a fresh shirt out of his bag, and pauses. There's a dresser next to the bed: four drawers and a mirror, white and yellow like the sunshine. He bets there isn't a Gideon Bible inside, either.
Normal people don't live out of duffel bags, right? And he'd promised.
He places the bag on the bedspread and drags the zipper open all the way.
He hasn't unpacked his duffel in years.
The top layer is all clothing, mostly wadded up in balls and thrown into disarray from the last few weeks of doing laundry on the run, hardly any time to spare between the road and the apocalypse. A few less-favored shirts are still rolled neatly, tucked into the corners of his bag - the green one with the weird bloodstain, the one he'd turned pink in the wash and meant to cut up for rags, the Mickey Mouse shirt that Sam had bought for him three summers ago when that witch cursed his clothes off in Orlando.
He leaves that one in the bag for now.
Weapons next: the ivory-handled Colt that Dad gave him when he turned sixteen, a bottle of Cas-blessed holy water to refill his flask, his second-favorite boot sheath (he was wearing his best), a spare set of lockpicks that he rarely carries these days.
Without the clothes and weapons, the bag is almost empty. He pulls a crumpled copy of Busty Asian Beauties out of the bottom debris and thinks about throwing it in the trash, but Ben might find it there. He tosses it on the bed - he'll take it out to the Impala tomorrow, with his gun and knife.
Loose change clinks against a spare flask of whiskey when he shakes the duffel, jostling against the case with his razor and shampoo. A few salt grains spill from the seams, clinging to the untouched shirt in the bottom of the bag. He picks out the metal and his bathroom kit, and carries the duffel over to shake it out into the trash. The shirt is still covered in salt, so he shakes that out, too. Something small goes flying out of the folds and clatters into the trash can. Dean stares down, feeling a weird sense of deja vu at the sound.
It's his amulet.
That son of a bitch, he'd *kept* it. Dean can't seem to catch his breath. He must have dug it out of the trash, then hid it in Dean's bag before they went to Detroit, like he knew this would happen afterward.
A sudden thumping sound makes him jump and grab for his knife, until he recognizes the sound of boyish feet on stairs and hears Ben's cheerful piping voice demanding breakfast. He should go down to eat, too, but he can't stop staring at the trash can like an idiot.
He bends down and snags the cord, brushing the loose salt away. It's cool to the touch - God is still a punk ass bitch in hiding, apparently. They never did figure out who the little horned dude was supposed to be, and why someone charmed it to detect God's presence. Even Cas didn't know, when Sam asked him, though Sam and Bobby still argued their pet theories sometimes.
Used to argue, anyway.
He stares at the amulet, warming slowly to body temp in the palm of his hand. Before Cas borrowed it to look for his dad, it had been around Dean's neck almost every day since the Christmas Sam gave it to him. He missed wearing it the whole time Cas carried it, but when he got it back, he'd never wanted to see it again.
That had happened before, he remembers suddenly -- the first month after Sam left for Stanford, he'd stuffed it in a box in the trunk, too angry to even look at it. He'd pulled in out again for a hunt, needing a protective charm, and it had been like having Sam with him again, just a little. He'd worn it from that day until his death, seven years later.
Sam wore it for him when he was in Hell. Maybe he can wear it for Sam, now.
Dean pulls the cord over his head, and the pendant settles into the hollow of his chest like it never left. He takes a deep breath, the amulet riding warm against his heart, and heads down to breakfast.
I have a vague memory that this started as a dream, but then I wrote the opening scene and had nothing else.
He opened his eyes to a wide expanse of stars, and knew he was supposed to kill someone.
He was clinging to the surface of a ship, the metal thick and curving under his hand. He moved himself along to the nearest airlock – slowly at first, stiff from being still in the pervasive cold, then smoothly gliding across the metal, keeping a firm grip on the surface.
At the airlock, he laid a hand over the access panel. This was always the trickiest part – disconnecting the monitoring system, then coaxing the right connections into place until the outer door unsealed and he could slip inside. The inner door was easier – same system as the first, with less security – and he cycled the lock and was inside in less than a minute. He pulled off his helmet and the thick insulated gloves and stashed them behind a storage locker. It was a good entry point: a cargo bay with lots of containers, but the lights were dimmed and no one visible. He knew where to go from here.
He paced silently down the curving hallways, alert for the sound of someone waking from their sleep cycle. The ship's corridors were mostly utilitarian, with the occasional aesthetic arc to an bulkhead and some decorative patterning on the deckplates. He found the door he wanted and pushed the lock until it slid open with only the quietest hiss of compressed air, then closed it behind him.
His target was sleeping, brown hair spilled over his pillow and hands lying peacefully on the clean white sheets.
He pulled a strip of metal from the pocket of his pressure suit. It was frigid from his long wait in the vacuum, but it warmed in his palm, stretched itself into a familiar shape – a point and edges, a hilt. The metal was familiar, too, but not pure – stray molecules of iron and copper mixed with the steel.
Old blood, he realized, the knife floating fully formed from his palm, already moving towards the man in the bed. His breath came short – he didn't want to do this, not again, no-
Agony flared up his spine and his mouth opened on a cry of pain, but no sound came out – he was supposed to be silent, no one can know you were there and he clawed at the strip of metal in his neck, choking on the feeling of it under his skin wrong wrong can't touch it no
The pain receded. The knife was moving towards the bed again, and he couldn't stop it, he was doing it, and he didn't want to no no no no-
He dug his fingers into his neck and screamed in his mind, red hot spikes of agony washing away his resistance bit by bit.
The knife was quivering in the air, so close now and
the man's eyes were open and he was
Charles let his hand drop away from his temple as the strange man in black collapsed to the floor. Something thumped to the bed next to his hand and he flinched away, adrenaline still rocketing through his body. He blinked away the haze of sleep that remained, and looked down at the object.
It was a knife. The man had just tried to kill him. He was an assassin.
He sat bolt upright – oh god, what if there were more? Charles clambered out of bed, already reaching across the ship with his mind. No foreign minds except the assassin; Raven and Hank were sleeping peacefully. Charles woke them with a thought and called them to his room, his attention already returning the man at his feet.
Charles knelt and brushed the man's mind with his own – unconscious, but not dead or comatose, thank god; his reaction had been so instinctive that he hadn't controlled its strength at all. The man had hit the floor fairly hard, so he let his hands automatically run through first aid checks – skull intact, no cervical damage, pupils even.
He felt for a pulse, and his fingers came away sticky with blood.
“Lights, on full,” he snapped, and tugged down the connector ring on the man's suit to get a better look.
Deep gouges ran around the base of the man's neck, bleeding sluggishly into the collar of suit liner: four parallel stripes, and a mess of crescent-shaped cuts. Fingernail marks, he thought, disconcerted. A check of the man's hands confirmed it – blood under his fingernails, and a ragged bleeding edge where one had ripped off down to the skin.
Charles sat back on his heels. There was something very strange going on. The assassin was wearing a pressure suit with the helmet removed, very high tech and not truly black, but made of some light-absorbing material that would probably render him nearly invisible in space. They had been out of dock from about a day and a half, now - how had he not felt him on the ship, or outside of it? His first awareness of the man had been the burst of pain that woke him, but appeared to have been self-inflicted, which didn't make any sense: how could someone have enough control to hide out on a spaceship with the intent to kill for over 36 hours, with a telepath onboard, only to claw himself bloody at the crucial moment? As a diagnosis, insanity didn't quite fit with the level of planning, but it would dangerous to check – he would need to go quite far down, with the man so deeply unconscious. He bit his lip, and gently sank into the man's mind.
What he found there nauseated him. The man's mind was shockingly vibrant - orderly and richly textured, sharp with intelligence – but huge swathes of memory had been blocked off and everything was steeped in bright rage and old pain, weighed down by despair. There were streaks of wrongness pulling the fine architecture of his thoughts awry, and Charles recoiled in horror.
“Charles, what are you – oh my god.”
He looked up to see his sister standing in the doorway, Hank gaping over her shoulder. “Raven,” he said, struggling for calm after the wreck of the man's mind. “Sorry, I didn't explain. Someone just tried to assassinate me. I woke up, luckily, and knocked him out.”
Raven flung herself across the room and wrapped her arms around him. He clung back, reassured by the steady, familiar warmth of her mind as much as her touch. “I'm fine,” he said, to her unspoken thoughts. “He didn't hurt me.”
Hank came over and put a tentative hand on Charles' shoulder. “Can you tell who sent him?”
Charles pulled away from Raven slightly and tilted his head up to look at Hank. “Well, there's a problem with that,” he said. “He doesn't know.”
“What? How can he not know who hired him?” Raven protested.
“I don't think he's a hired killer, Raven. Someone – a telepath – has put extensive memory blocks in his mind, and he's wearing a control collar.” He felt a wave of revulsion from Hank, whose own experience with one had been thankfully brief, but still scarring. “He was fighting it – that's what woke me up.”
“Jesus, I didn't think you could resist one of those,” Raven said, reaching out for Hank's hand and squeezing. She didn't have to be a telepath to know Hank needed the comfort.
“Not without a lot of pain,” Hank said quietly. “And not for long, not without the risk of neural damage.” He blinked rapidly, and Charles could feel his thoughts shifting into problem-solving mode, pushing the painful memories aside. “I can deactivate the mechanism, but removal will take surgical equipment we don't have on the ship. Most models are hooked into the cranial nerves, but I've seen a few that were directly linked to the cerebellum, and removing that could kill him.”
“Thank you, Hank,” Charles said. “We'll have to move him to the infirmary.”
Hank nodded jerkily. “I'll grab a grav unit,” he said, and ducked into the hallway.
Raven leaned against Charles' shoulder again. “Charles, we need to know who sent him,” she said. “What if they try again?”
“I know, darling,” he said, tilting his head against hers. “I might be able to remove the blocks, but it could take weeks. And I....” he trailed off, examining the man's face. He hadn't given it the time, before. The man was pale and drawn, ill-looking; his pressure suit was skintight across lean muscle, but he was almost painfully thin otherwise. Someone had driven him to the limit of his resources, both mentally and physically, and Charles wouldn't add to that. “I'll have to ask him for permission, first. He might not want to know, and I owe him the choice.”
“And I'm afraid I don't know your name.”
“Neither do I,” he said roughly.
Snow White & the Huntsman
Wow, I have...no memory of writing this. Apparently I liked the movie enough to want to write fic, which must have lasted all of a week. Warnings for...overly poetic and euphemistic cunnilingus?
She held court in the yard under the apple tree, and spent as much time as she could outside, until the pale white of her skin softened into pink and brown. In the early days, the sun painted red across her cheeks and nose, and along the crest of her shoulders, but they faded into freckles as the weeks went by.
He often wished he could trace his fingers where the sun had touched her, follow the warm lines of her skin out of sight. He settled for offering his arm when she rose from her chair, and kissing her hand when he knelt for her.
She argues with William constantly, just as when they were children. It’s frustrating, but she prefers it to the times when guilt washes over his face and he ceases to argue at all. Those tainted victories are truly losses - not just of valuable counsel, but of the friend she remembers.
More privately, she dreams of William’s lips turning hard under hers, the salt of his skin turning tart and the apple choking her to death, and hates that Ravenna’s poison will not leach from this as it does from the land. The hills grow green around her, but she is still a rose growing in the snow.
[Time to build a fire.]
The Huntsman stays at court, though he refuses to wear court dress. Snow cannot blame him, for she grew up with the things and is still constantly uncomfortable.
“You are more powerful than she was,” he said. “She cut out the hearts she wanted and threw away the rest, but we offer ours to you freely.”
She smiled at him. “It seems true hearts come with loud voices, and not all of them as wise as they think themselves.”
For a moment, she felt exposed, open and vulnerable - but then his hands cupped her waist, gentle and rough against her skin, and his mouth surrounded her, his tongue inside her, and she buried her hands in the warm brown of his hair.
She rose up against the heat of his mouth, again and again, until the heat spread through her like sunshine and, trembling, she fell.
“They say that our actions are a mirror of who we are, but mirrors only show us parts of ourselves. But you have always been the same man. I think that battle showed you things that made you turn away, and your wife showed you the best things. When you lost her, you could not believe in that part anymore.” She stroked a thumb over the curve of his cheek. “When you found me, you were a good man who was tempted to do a bad thing in the name of love, and still you stopped yourself. You are a survivor, but you used those skills to protect and teach me. You are an honest man who does not speak as much as you should. You say that I brought you back to your life, but I know that you brought me back as well.”
He startled under her fingers, and she brought up her other hand to cup his face in her palms. She said, “I woke up alone, but there were tears that were not mine on my face, and an empty bottle of spirits on the floor. I could still taste it on my lips. You saved me.”
I learned because I lived in the dark for so long.
You deserve to be more than reflection.
“I'll watch over her.”
“She doesn't need you to protect her; she needs you to trust her.”
SPN post-S5 coda
I think I wrote this scene of Dean unpacking his duffel bag at Lisa's right after the S5 finale, and then never a) posted it or b) watched the S6 premiere. So, you know, caveat lector. Prettty sure it's been jossed.
Dean wakes up with a start, his shirt soaked through and Sam's name trapped behind his clenched teeth.
Thank G-... thankfully, he hadn't screamed.
Morning light is streaming warm and cheerful through the windows of Lisa's spare bedroom, but the nightmare lingers anyway. He goes to the bathroom, washes away the sweat and the screams and the sound of knives, and doesn't look in the mirror.
On the way back to bed, he stumbles over his duffel, tossed carelessly on the floor last night. He'd gotten just drunk enough at dinner to fall asleep easy, but not enough to worry Lisa. She'd offered her guest room before he could even make a joke about sleeping on the couch. Her smile had been warm, hopeful, and Dean had known that he could do this, that he could keep his promise to Sam and Lisa would be happy, too.
He pulls a fresh shirt out of his bag, and pauses. There's a dresser next to the bed: four drawers and a mirror, white and yellow like the sunshine. He bets there isn't a Gideon Bible inside, either.
Normal people don't live out of duffel bags, right? And he'd promised.
He places the bag on the bedspread and drags the zipper open all the way.
He hasn't unpacked his duffel in years.
The top layer is all clothing, mostly wadded up in balls and thrown into disarray from the last few weeks of doing laundry on the run, hardly any time to spare between the road and the apocalypse. A few less-favored shirts are still rolled neatly, tucked into the corners of his bag - the green one with the weird bloodstain, the one he'd turned pink in the wash and meant to cut up for rags, the Mickey Mouse shirt that Sam had bought for him three summers ago when that witch cursed his clothes off in Orlando.
He leaves that one in the bag for now.
Weapons next: the ivory-handled Colt that Dad gave him when he turned sixteen, a bottle of Cas-blessed holy water to refill his flask, his second-favorite boot sheath (he was wearing his best), a spare set of lockpicks that he rarely carries these days.
Without the clothes and weapons, the bag is almost empty. He pulls a crumpled copy of Busty Asian Beauties out of the bottom debris and thinks about throwing it in the trash, but Ben might find it there. He tosses it on the bed - he'll take it out to the Impala tomorrow, with his gun and knife.
Loose change clinks against a spare flask of whiskey when he shakes the duffel, jostling against the case with his razor and shampoo. A few salt grains spill from the seams, clinging to the untouched shirt in the bottom of the bag. He picks out the metal and his bathroom kit, and carries the duffel over to shake it out into the trash. The shirt is still covered in salt, so he shakes that out, too. Something small goes flying out of the folds and clatters into the trash can. Dean stares down, feeling a weird sense of deja vu at the sound.
It's his amulet.
That son of a bitch, he'd *kept* it. Dean can't seem to catch his breath. He must have dug it out of the trash, then hid it in Dean's bag before they went to Detroit, like he knew this would happen afterward.
A sudden thumping sound makes him jump and grab for his knife, until he recognizes the sound of boyish feet on stairs and hears Ben's cheerful piping voice demanding breakfast. He should go down to eat, too, but he can't stop staring at the trash can like an idiot.
He bends down and snags the cord, brushing the loose salt away. It's cool to the touch - God is still a punk ass bitch in hiding, apparently. They never did figure out who the little horned dude was supposed to be, and why someone charmed it to detect God's presence. Even Cas didn't know, when Sam asked him, though Sam and Bobby still argued their pet theories sometimes.
Used to argue, anyway.
He stares at the amulet, warming slowly to body temp in the palm of his hand. Before Cas borrowed it to look for his dad, it had been around Dean's neck almost every day since the Christmas Sam gave it to him. He missed wearing it the whole time Cas carried it, but when he got it back, he'd never wanted to see it again.
That had happened before, he remembers suddenly -- the first month after Sam left for Stanford, he'd stuffed it in a box in the trunk, too angry to even look at it. He'd pulled in out again for a hunt, needing a protective charm, and it had been like having Sam with him again, just a little. He'd worn it from that day until his death, seven years later.
Sam wore it for him when he was in Hell. Maybe he can wear it for Sam, now.
Dean pulls the cord over his head, and the pendant settles into the hollow of his chest like it never left. He takes a deep breath, the amulet riding warm against his heart, and heads down to breakfast.