Chapter Text
Icy leaves chewed their skin, gnawed through their feet and up their barely protected legs. The heaps of snow from the apocalypse-brought-on-weather in the middle of Nebraska were a dread for anyone unfortunate enough to be encaged in it with no form of real, protective shelter. Snow melted onto their scalp in a gentle rhythm; each flake planting its bitter roots into their brain. A blood-sucker was bound to be clawing their pasty mitts round one of those trees somewhere nearby. They had hoped that by this point every vampire in the area had learned to steer clear of their crumpled barn and half-empty pond, but clearly they hadn't.
Rapid taps started stumbling towards them; ferocity in their intent. Reaching for the promise of thick, warm blood. It tried to latch on, snapping it's gangly arm around theirs. Silver spun through the frenzy and right to its flaking neck. Its skin reeled back as the knife sliced through. Blood gurgled up through its throat, bubbling and spewing past its thorny teeth. Its eyes never softened as it's body collapsed, and it's head remained stable. Two stumpy hands clenched at either ear, gripping with bone-bending strength. It shrieked as it's life fled. Not a sound of fear, but a call of fury. An anger released after defeat.
The stood there for a minute, looking into the dead-eyed glare of the life they had just stolen. Thump. The head hit the ground to lie with it's body, finally whole again. They had given up on burying the bodies months ago. No point. There were too many, especially because of idiotic tourists and unprepared hikers.
Every month of the year, hundreds of hikers wandered over to the north to Maine to hike around the vaguely marked trails. It was famous more so for the "haunted hotel" that gave them access to the trail rather than the route itself. People went missing all the time, nobody ever did anything because every time somebody went missing, it was placed down to them getting lost on the trail, committing suicide or falling off a cliff. The vampires were smart. They ran the hotel. They staged the deaths. They fed. There was no way that they could be fully stopped. Anyone who didn't go missing joined the hotel; those same people would be the first to ache for fresh blood. Nearest in the vicinity being they themself who lived in their depressive little cabin.
As they continued their journey, the blood started to wear off of their boots into the freshly-laid blanket of snow. It left a trail of blood in their wake; an easy way to track them, but something that they really couldn't care about. The newbies were easy kills, the older ones thought chasing them was a waste of time, therefore, no real threat to their wellbeing.
A barn came into view, their home. Fire crackled from the inside, a warm glow shadowing their face. Luckily, the almost rubble-like structure withheld a vastly useful roof above it, preventing the wind and snow from penetrating its premises and therefore preventing it from putting the fire out.
They clattered inside and harshly slammed and locked the door behind them. Floundering towards the fire, they collapsed on the floor and sunk into unbridled exhaustion. Warmth caressed their face with gentle wisps of energy. It was calming.
At that point, a grey tabby plodded over to them and mowed a hum of relief into their ear. Hearing this, they stretched up from the floor, walked to the other side of the barn, collected a blanket, collected a frozen fish (which they had caught from the nearby river before it got too cold), and stumbled back over to their pile of old, rotten hay.
The fish icicle was tossed into the flames as the cat led them to lie down on their makeshift bed. An acute waft of mould flooded their face. Nothing but a meagre blink. It felt... normal now. The year had been going by so incredibly rapidly. They thought so at least... They only kept track of time through poems and woodcarving. Writing scrawled over the rotten wood, engraved in with a silver knife. Wood chips littered the floors, packed against the cracks in the walls. Any wood that wasn't waste was turned into small wooden trinkets. Eyes, knives, flowers, cutlery, pots. All sorts of things.
Crackling flames settled to their feet as they consumed as much radiated heat as possible. The cat drew itself to their chest, popping itself down and muttering a deep purr.
"Hi Wonky..." They hummed.
Wonky glanced up at them with a curious chirp and a placid smile. A minorly sickening fish smell surrounded them. The food was ready. Gingerly, they sat up and dragged the fish out of the fire, placing it on the blanket that they had dragged out. Silence sat for a few seconds before they snapped the fish in half. One part going to them. The other, to Wonky.
Both sat and ate in silence, enjoying their last meal of the night.
The rising sun started to splinter through the cracks in the boards. It ran to their eyes, staining them with fractured light. Their sign to retire to bed.
They spat the bones out with a thin smile. Rest was on the horizon.
As they drifted into sleep, thoughts of soon-to-be-forgotten hikers and ghost-hunters plagued their wormy brain. Just lives awaiting their end. At that, sleep consumed them, dragging them into fleeting bliss.
____________________
Icicles seemed to form on every pine needle. Fresh snow crunched beneath every step he made. Dean Winchester had begun a hunt. He had realised that it was mainly hikers and ghost-hunters going missing (though only around two a month, it still seemed suspicious), so Dean decided to ask any hikers walking around if they had seen anything... weird. Turns out, some had. A few claimed to have seen an odd-looking cabin in the woods; they thought it belonged to a groundskeeper. There's no groundskeeper. Asking the hotel workers had brought on no leads on what could be in there. Dean had his ideas though...
People who went at night claimed that nothing was in there or never returned, people who searched during the day simply didn't actually search it. The latter held all the more sense. The likelihood that that was the nest was decently high, so Dean went to check it out.
Well, turns out, Dean found that stupid cabin. Yes, the snow had built up as furious piles of flaky ice; however, it could not cover a set of bloody tracks. A long line of deep footprints faded in and out of the ground beneath him like an old black-and-white animation, leading him to the odd wooden shack. Though, peering deeper, Dean was able to spot small speckles of sickly red below the surface of every shallow footstep. Blood. Not limping, not pained. The stalking shadow of a murderer. Seemed likely enough to be related to the damned things. Probably the blood of some idiot who decided to go ghost hunting during the night.
Dean wandered forward through the snow. Caution in every step; drawing out the anticipation of finding whatever vampires sat awaiting in that cabin.
It started to appear on the horizon. Floating through the hundreds of pine trees that sat in roughly misaligned rows. A trail of slushed-up blood finally faded out towards the ramshackle hut. One big pile of rotten wood and corrugated iron. A problem arose to Dean's view. He hadn't taken into account exactly how run-down the shack was. The bastard thing was covered in holes, not a place for a vampire to reside.
"Shit", Dean muttered as he kicked the snow beneath his boot into a swinging arch of pale blood and grime.
Still, he proceeded. Something was bound to be in there anyway. A ghost, maybe? There was a smell of smoke erupting from it; maybe someone had died in a house fire and was running around feeling angry about it. Didn't seem too likely.
The smell of smoke became increasingly intense as Dean continued towards the house. There was somebody in there. Someone with fire. Someone in danger, possibly?
Tentatively, Dean pressed his fingers to the delicate door, watching as it creaked and screamed to open further. A thin coating of red liquid blessed his fingertips. Smelling it, Dean discovered it was an odd mix of vampire blood and dead man's blood. Some kind of warning, maybe? Light bloomed through the opening, sizzling heat accompanying it. A campfire lay crackling in the middle of the dirt floor, a filthy mattress placed almost directly next to it. One pile of clothing slumped in the corner. Not one price of fabric seemed to be clean. Dirt caked every fibre, clumping around the angles of jeans and the hems of shirts. Though looking a little closer, streaks of red seemed to appear within the muck. Likely blood. Likely human. Maybe not...
All other signals did point to it being a human that resided in that shit hole. Even the walls that had carved, unintelligible scribbles of what seemed to be poems on the walls.
Rubble and debris covered every inch of the mud floors, bricks, logs, half-burnt sticks... hundreds of sharp, pointy teeth. Okay, maybe not a vampire pack. Maybe just one rogue vampire? Within all this debris, small wooden statues sat on the floor, maybe about a hundred. All handmade.
Dean didn't want to believe that whatever lived inside was human. It was all too inhumane for someone to be living like this, likely alone.
That's when he heard it. A holler erupted from something across the room, a holler of "Show me your teeth!" In a remarkably rusty British accent.
A glint of metal shone in his eye as somebody latched onto his coat and pressed something cold and metallic to his jugular.
Dean was frozen.
Another cry came from behind, something that sounded like a mix between a hiss and a yell of "Get the fuck out!' followed by a dash of grey and brown out of one of the holes in the walls.
Dean ignored it, putting it down to being another yell from whatever was trying to behead him.
"Alright, alright!" He screamed, baring his teeth.
Satisfied, it dropped its weapon to the floor, stepped back into the light and started to weep. It wept and wept, shimmering glass tears falling down its face, arms curling to cover its throat.
"It" was a teenager. A child.
The kid looked down and wept towards their feet, staring directly at the floor. Tears mingled in their tightly wound hands and flowed to the gaps between their knotted together fingers. Wailing filled the room as the child collapsed to their knees into a pile of rubble.
Dean was frozen; he didn't know what to do. He knelt down in front of them.
"Hey, kid, uhm... It's alright, we- I- I won't hurt you. Promise." Dean said tentatively, hoping not to freak the poor kid out even more than they already were.
"Y-you're not a vampire! You're a person! Please! Tell me- Tell me t-that you're real!" They howled as they looked up towards him, eyes wide and drenched in thick, lucid fear.
Hesitantly, Dean touched their shoulder, gripping it tightly.
"I'm real", he asserted. His words thrummed through even his own head. Something like this had never really happened to him before. He never imagined he'd have to comfort a homeless teenager who tried to decapitate him whilst they both hunted vampires. Not exactly an odd situation for him, but strange enough that it would be memorable.
They latched onto him, gripping the back of his jacket tightly. Both of them sat there for a minute or two until the kid's breathing levelled out and they started to let go. Gently, Dean led them both to stand up.
He watched as the child stood back. That was the first point at which he managed to actually take a look at them. Their arm's hung limply by their sides, not bothering to tense up out of anticipation. They reeked of smoke and fish. Olive, black and brown hair sat in one, stringy, matted, shoulder-length nest atop their head; flourishing down like a weave of brambles. The kid seemed healthy enough for someone living in a hut in the middle of nowhere. Dean figured that they had likely been stealing food from dead hikers and the hotel. Freckles spattered over their face. Shadowy brown tried seemed to draw focus, they would have if not for the scars that tore across their nose bridge and the deep, barely healed gash across their neck, it seemed to have previously been covered up if the green, blood-covered rag on the floor was anything to go by. Didn't seem deep enough to be life-threatening, at least.
"Do you want to erm... Come with me?" Dean asked hesitantly, as if saying the wrong thing would result in a brawl with a filthy, scrawny, frankly disturbing teenager.
"Only if we can get rid of that hotel." The child noted.
Dean understood at once why. The vampire nest. God, he was an idiot.
Tense silence lumbered through the air around them until the child spoke, snapping it like a brittle twig.
"Fig", the kid mumbled.
"What..?" Dean threw back.
"My name is Fig. Fig Huxley." They seemed strangely calm compared to their breakdown, which had only happened a few seconds ago.
"Dean... Dean Winchester..." He replied.
"We should.. go..." They said almost insistently.
"Uhm, yeah, oh- okay. Do you have anything you want to maybe... Bring with you?" Dean suggested as he gesticulated with his hands to point around the room.
Fig wandered to the back of the room and picked up a large green backpack.
"It's what I brought with me..." They mumbled as they started to follow Dean out of the hut.
__________________
"Wonky!..Wonky!" They called into the forest.
"What the hell are you doing..." Dean stated. He wasn't really asking a question (more so asking the kid to stop), but Fig answered anyway.
"Calling for my cat." Just as they said that, a fluffy, crying tabby cat floundered to their feet, clumps of snow caught in its fur. It hopped and leapt up onto Fig's shoulder, glaring daggers at Dean
Dean guessed that "Wonky" was probably the thing that had dashed out of the hut earlier. It seemed like the animal despised him already.
Both the cat and the kid seemed intertwined as one being, truly reliant on one another. It was likely that the cat had been the only pleasant interaction Fig had had since they somehow arrived in that depressing little hut. Kind of like him and Sam, Dean thought.
"I'm glad you found me during the day..." Fig stated.
"Yeah..Why's that?"
"We have more time to prepare. The vampires only attend the hotel at night. It's easier to cover up the deaths of wannabe Ghostbusters and those stupid night hikers." The kid explained.
Dean gave a hum in response as he led Fig back they came.
"How did you end up here?" Dean asked as an attempt to fill the mind-numbing silence that was only interrupted by their footsteps making indents in the snow.
"Long story." Fig responded dismissively as they pulled their previously concealed knife out of their pocket and started to clean it.
This went on for a few minutes longer, Dean asking pointless questions that the kid would not give a real answer for, whilst they gently cleaned their blood-stained knife with the hem of their shirt.
"One second. I need to do something..." Fig spat out. Intending for it to sound like an order: which it did.
Dean halted in his tracks and turned to look at the kid. They were approaching a tree, knife in hand. Bark then started to fall to the floor, allowing itself to be carved away.
An eye soon made a place for itself within the tree's stature.
"Done with your little art project, kid?" Dean called out.
"It's a warning. The blood suckers are scared of me... Well.. most of them are... Anyways, I draw this, they don't follow the tracks, most are too scared that they'll find me waiting to behead them.
At that moment, the kid brought their knife up to their arm and started to draw a long cut over their forearm, letting the wound fall in line with the rest of the scars and half-healed scabs on their arm. Blood poured out, allowing Fig to collect it in their hand.
Once every one of their fingers was sufficiently covered in the sickly, crimson liquid, they started to drag the fluid along the contours of the eye and into a stark pupil in the middle of the sacred carving.
Dean watched in disgusting admiration. He shouldn't feel proud of the kid. They were bleeding themself out in the middle of a snowy forest. But they reminded him so much of Sam when he was younger (and maybe even Sam now). Maybe more deranged and unsettling, but still. Both wanted to protect the innocent, whether that meant hurting themselves or putting themselves in mortal danger.
Once the kid stopped their grotesque display of power over vampires, Dean rushed over, snagging a piece of loose fabric from the top of the kid's backpack and wrapping it around their arm to try and stop any ongoing bleeding. In all honesty, it didn't. What it did do was cause Fig to stare up at Dean with a confused and grateful gaze.
"Thanks" they huffed.
"Yeah, anytime, kid." Dean mumbled back.
_____________
It took a long time, but, eventually they reached the black impala.
"This is baby." Dean pointed out as if he were referring to a human being.
"You named your car?" Fig questioned with a glare that almost reminded him of Cas' weird puppy dog head tilt. Speaking of Cas', where was that jackass? Dean thought. He could be rather useful right now...
At that very moment, a flap of wings blustered a little too close behind him.
"Cas... Personal space," Dean groaned with vague annoyance.
However, instead of getting further away, Castiel moved closer, basically slotting himself in right behind Dean and breathing on the back of his neck. Dean shivered and stepped forward, away from Cas.
"Personal space means give me room, Cas.' Not come closer. Sighed the slightly unnerved hunter.
"Is this your boyfriend or something?" Fig asked.
"No!" Dean cried.
"Yes, I am." Cas responded. "You're my friend, and the vessel I am inhabiting is, in fact, male. Also, the possessive pronoun used by... it... insinuates that you and I are "best friends", which is seemingly rather accurate to our bond."
"Firstly, that is a child. not an it." Dean said as he gesticulated towards the child that now stood behind him.
"My name is Fig Huxley." they mumbled towards Castiel.
"Secondly," Dean stated, "a boyfriend is someone to be romantically and potentially sexually involved with Cas... of which we are neither. Ya know, for whatever eldrich being you really are, you're really unaware of human customs."
"Ah... thank you for explaining," Cas remarked with his usual neutral expression.
"He's not human, is he..." Fig said, politely barging into the conversation.
"I am Castiel. Angel of the lord." Cas stated matter-of-factly.
"Nice... guess I was wrong then...god really is just a dick..." Fig replied.
"Yeah..." Dean sighed as he walked over to the back of the impala and opened the boot.
"Put your backpack in kid."
Fig then started into action, moving drowsily past both Castiel and Dean, Wonky trailing at their heel. They placed their backpack gently into the boot and slammed it shut before climbing into the backseat.
Dean remained outside, continuously darting his vision to look at the half-dead kid that was currently inhabiting his car.
"Are they human?" Dean asked.
"Yes. I'm sure of it." Cas responded, refusing to develop on his answer.
"Cas... What do I do? I've just picked up a homeless teenager to try and save em'. They know about the vamps and would be deemed fuckin' insane if I handed em' to the cops. They're drenched in scars and wounds. I... Should I keep em' , like adopt em' ? I don't think they have anywhere else to go." Rambling was the only thing that could describe Dean's pattern of speech at that moment. His mind raced with shooting panic.
If it were any normal kid then he could probably send them off to foster care. This kid though. This kid had trained themself to be a hunter, a decent one for their age at that. All whilst alone.
The kid would never be able to integrate back into regular society now. They were way too far gone.
Cas looked back at Dean.
"I would say to keep them. They are... so incredibly human. Too human. To the point where they seem inhuman. You've had experience raising teenagers l. Am I correct?"
"Yeah, but that was my brother... This is, again, some random kid I met an hour ago."
A silence placed itself between them and remained there for a good few seconds before Dean broke it.
"I'll take em' on this hunt and then I'll find em' somewhere to stay." Dean stated, looking back over to his car and spotting that Fig was asleep.
Cas nodded, and, with a brush of feathers, disintegrated back to the thing that was previously occupying his time.
Dean made his way back over to the impala and collapsed into the driver's seat. He then started to drive, not looking back at the unconscious teen that was currently sleeping in the position of a dead woodlouse.