Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dean was making small talk with Dave, the local vet, over the guy’s ‘sometimes I hate this job’ cup of hot chocolate when a car pulled up into the oasis of artificial light that the Last Chance was sitting in. It was a sedan, dark-colored and dark-windowed and covered with dust, and the engine sounded like someone had been asking too much of it lately. It didn’t shut off, either, and the car had parked itself somewhat sloppily at an angle in front of the door like the driver was expecting needing to take off again in a hurry. Dean swore and moved out from behind the counter, shaking his head at the also-alarmed vet. “Just…stay behind me, Dave. If shit starts to go down, get down behind the counter – or duck into the basement if you have to – and use my cell to call 9-1-1.”

“Your…”

“Trust me, the call will go through. It’s kind of a sat-phone, it was a present from a friend.” Actually it had been a present by way of a friend’s friend, but Dean wasn’t going to explain that to Dave. Or the circumstances which had made those friends of his friend decide he needed communication capabilities on par with what they used at work.

The Castiel incident had shaken up Steve’s team quite a bit, apparently. Mainly because they saw it as pure luck that Steve had been there to back Dean up and call for help from the one guy they had on hand who thought angels were more of an annoyance than a threat.

Of course, that guy was named Thor, and he just happened to be a Norse god. He also happened to be buddies with Crowley, the current King of Hell and former boyfriend of Thor’s sister, and the two of them had eaten an entire pie and told stories that were a whole lot wilder than the ones Thor had been telling by himself earlier that evening. And then Bruce and Cecil had shown up and things had gotten sort of surreal after that because Crowley was apparently a fan and Thor thought Night Vale was a real place. Or had been a real place once. Or maybe Thor had just been fucking with everyone to break the rest of the tension, because Dean had seen Bruce giving the guy an I-see-what-you-did-there eyebrow a couple of times. It didn’t really matter, though. It had started off as a really bad night and turned into a really weird but good one. Especially since Steve, being the semi-immortal leader of a team that contained a Norse god, hadn’t batted an eyelash at Castiel or Crowley or finding out that Dean was pretty much immortal too.

He’d been awfully happy about that last one, in fact. And, honestly, for the first time so had Dean.

Things had been quiet in the month or so since then, but Dean hadn’t expected it to stay that way for too much longer. It was like he could feel wheels turning, things happening, and he was just waiting for the ripples from whatever it was to start reaching him. Apparently tonight was the night – or rather this morning was the morning, since it was a few hours past midnight – because things had started off pretty normal and now there was a mysterious getaway car parked in front of the Last Chance and not being vulnerable to bullets if someone came out firing was going to be really hard to explain to Dave.

The driver’s side door of the still-running car opened and a wild-eyed, dark-haired man pulled himself out and stared at Dean, then left the car and staggered to the diner’s door, shoving it open with a hand that had really obviously been used to punch somebody. “Dean, problem!”

“I can see that, yeah.” Dean had met him at the door, but when he tried to lead the older man to a seat he was shaken off. “Tony, what…”

“I can’t…I can’t stay, I have to get back to the mansion.” Tony swallowed. “Dean, we were…we were set up. By our own people, if you can call them that. They tried to take Steve. I stopped them!” he insisted quickly, before Dean could react to that. “I stopped them, and then I just…I didn’t have a choice, couldn’t get a plane or anything, we had to drive. He’s healing, but…Dean, what we talked about, before?” Dean paled, and Tony shook his head – a little too hard – and grasped his arm. “No, it’s just…Dean, all he wanted was you. So I brought him. Is that…”

Dean was out the door before the older man could finish his sentence. He pulled open the car’s dented passenger door…and one blue eye blinked up at him from a bruised, blood-streaked face. “You look like shit,” Dean observed, heart skipping a beat in his chest.

“Oh…believe me, I feel…way worse than that,” Steve rasped. He was still wearing what Dean assumed was his uniform, the condition of which gave mute evidence of just how badly things must have gone. “A wall…fell on me.”

“I figured it was something like that.” Dean’s mind snapped into getting shit done mode, a place he really hadn’t had to go since he’d started running the diner. “Can you walk?” Steve shook his head, and Dean straightened and gestured urgently to Dave, who was talking to Tony. The vet immediately sprinted out to join him. “I’m gonna need your help, he’s hurt pretty bad and we need to get him inside.”

“Mr. Stark said he had at least one broken leg,” Dave confirmed, pushing Dean out of the way. He greeted the blue eye that blinked at him with a lopsided professional grin. “I’m not exactly the kind of doctor you need, Captain, but we’ll have to make due for the time being. Now let’s ease your legs out first. Dean, you keep him from sliding sideways…”

They managed to get Steve out of the car and half-carry him into the diner, and Tony pushed in close and grabbed Steve’s shoulder, squeezing but not very hard. “Bruce is on his way, Steve,” he said. “And Dr. Dave here has promised me he knows the difference between horses and people. I’m off again, but I’ll come back for you.”

“Promise you’ll…be as careful as you can?”

“You’re asking me to lie to you?”

“No, I guess not.” Steve smiled. “Thanks.”

“You can thank me when I come back in all my glory,” Tony told him, trying and almost succeeding in producing a cocky smirk. He smacked Dean on the arm. “I’ll be back as soon as I can…but I don’t know when that will be, because I don’t know what’s waiting for me. Between you and Bruce, though…”

“We’ll be fine,” Dean assured him. “Did you lose your phone?”

Tony swallowed. “You could say that, yeah.”

Dean snatched his off the counter and shoved it into the older man’s hand. “Bruce will have his,” he said when Tony started to protest. “And if you called him from the gas station, he’ll be halfway here already.”

Tony’s battered hand clenched around the phone. “I’ll be back,” he insisted, and then he was out the door and the car was grinding back onto the highway in a cloud of off-colored exhaust.

Steve’s head dropped like he just couldn’t hold it up anymore. “You’d better be.”

Dave frowned at Dean over the bent head. “He can’t stay out here. Your bed?”

“It’s down in the basement. The stairs…”

“We don’t have a choice,” Dave interrupted. “He can’t stay up here, he needs to lay flat, to stretch out – and he shouldn’t be in front of the windows anyway, Mr. Stark said to keep him out of sight.”

“Tony’s…a worry-wart,” Steve told him. “Can’t say I…wouldn’t like to lay down, though.” He blinked at Dean. “You don’t mind?”

Dean found a smile, packed all of the warmth he could into it. “Of course I don’t mind. You’re gonna hate the stairs, though, so let’s get it over with. One step at a time…”

Later, Dean was never sure which one of them the stairs had been harder on – Steve, or him. And getting Steve’s uniform off of him ran a close second, since it was lined with some sort of body armor material and had to be taken off the same way it had gone on instead of being ripped or cut. As much as he didn’t want to, though, the minute Dave didn’t need his help anymore Dean pelted back upstairs to watch for Bruce – or anyone else who might show up at the diner. Dave joined him shortly thereafter, shrugging at Dean’s raised eyebrow and settling back onto the stool he’d vacated earlier. “He’s asleep, and until a real doctor gets here I’ve pretty much done all I can do.” He was giving Dean an odd, somewhat stunned look, but then he shook his head, picking up his now-cold chocolate and taking a sip. “I’m just…well, my mind’s kind of blown right now. I never would have guessed…but I can guess why you didn’t say anything, and you have my word I won’t.” He glanced up. “Thanks, though.”

“Thanks?”

“For your service, Dean.” He waved aimlessly at the door. “Not like I didn’t know who they both were the minute I saw them. I don’t know what you used to do, before you came here,” he held up a hand, “and I’m not asking. But whatever it was…I mean it, thanks.”

Dean took a deep breath, nodding, and confiscated his cup. “Let me get you a refill – on the house, it’s my fault it got cold.”

Dave grinned. “Extra whipped cream, if you don’t mind – I mean it, nights like this I don’t know why I became a vet. It’s not the animals I can’t stand, it’s the damned stupid owners…”

Bruce showed up some twenty minutes later, with Cecil. Dave, not surprisingly, also seemed to know who Bruce was, although he seemed nervous around the scientist for some reason. Bruce ignored it, asked a few questions and thanked him for his help, and then disappeared into the basement. Dave took his leave shortly thereafter, and as soon as he was gone Dean found himself being pulled into a hard hug by Cecil. “Are you okay, sweetheart?” the older man wanted to know.

“Yeah.” Being hugged by Cecil was sort of like being hugged by a particularly friendly octopus, although Dean wasn’t sure why. It didn’t feel weird, though, it felt…safe. He’d had hugs like this from Bobby a few times. “I’m…it was just…I wouldn’t have expected him to…”

“Ask for you?” Cecil pulled back and looked him in the eye. “Dean, why wouldn’t he? He loves you, of course he’d want to be with you. And you two are just perfect for each other.”

Dean blinked. Cecil had pushed his bangs back and was looking him in the eye…with three brown eyes, not two. The third eye was in the center of his forehead, but otherwise looked perfectly normal. Dean said the first thing that came into his mind. “You only need glasses on two of them?”

Cecil smiled, the corners of all three eyes crinkling. “I usually just keep the third one closed and let my hair cover it.” He let go of Dean’s shoulders and sat down at the counter. “Tony probably didn’t have time to tell you what happened – he was scared to death they were going to catch him out on the road without his suit and Steve in no condition to fight off anything bigger than a housefly. ‘They’ being a quasi-government organization called SHIELD, who all of them used to work for once upon a time until they realized the organization had been turning evil. Well, more evil.”

Dean sat down across from him. “The same people who thought Steve should be their ‘eternal soldier’?”

“Also the ones who turned Steve’s former best friend into a cyborg assassin, gave Clint’s partner to him as a bed toy, resurrected and then brainwashed their handler, made Bruce an international fugitive, destroyed the love of Tony’s life with experimental drugs…and were responsible for my Carlos’s death.”

Dean’s mouth had dropped open in horror. “Thor?”

“He’s not vulnerable to them unless he screws up and dishonors himself, and he’s off-planet a lot, but his girlfriend works for one of their satellite labs. Luckily they need her research, so they’re still leaving her and that lab alone. For now. And she probably knows less about the situation than you do, honestly – she’s like one of those Disney movie scientists, from what I understand, she pretty much only notices what’s right in front of her. Anyway, this is the organization that set up Tony and Steve yesterday. Called them out to handle something supposedly minor at a time when the two of them were the only ones available. They went, realized it was a setup about five minutes too late, and part of a building fell on them. Tony ended up having to fight off the SHIELD agents who supposedly showed up to ‘help’ – they were actually there to kidnap Steve. They’d come prepared and they pretty much destroyed Tony’s suit, but he still managed to put them out of commission and then he grabbed Steve, stole one of the agents’ cars, and started hauling ass back to Malibu for reinforcements and another suit.”

“Suit?”

Cecil blinked at him. “You haven’t…no, I guess you wouldn’t have. Tony the Tech Guy, aka Tony Stark the billionaire genius philanthropist…aka Iron Man?”

“I knew the first one, and I’ve heard of the second one but I didn’t know Steve’s Tony was him. The third one…I saw that on the front of a tabloid once, but I thought it was a robot or something.”

“Close enough.” Cecil waved it away. “You’ll get to see the suit when he comes back, until then all you need to know is that Tony found a mechanical way to turn himself into a superhero and it puts him on a level somewhere between Steve and Thor. Without it, though…well, he’s at a disadvantage, at least physically. So he was hauling ass back to his workshop when Steve, who’d been in and out, started asking for you.”

“And Tony remembered that Bruce was out here and brought him.”

Cecil shook his head. “Tony had never forgotten that Bruce was out here, Dean; it was just out of his way, he was making a beeline for Malibu where all of his resources are at. But he made that detour when Steve asked for you…because Steve never asks anybody for anything, and if what he wanted was you then that’s what Tony was going to give him.” Suddenly he blinked, all three eyes at once, and turned halfway around to look…well, at what Dean wasn’t sure, then turned back around and shrugged. “Looks like he managed to get hold of Clint, and Clint is on his way here.” He smiled somewhat apologetically. “I think this just became their fallback spot. I’d say we could relocate to the power station to keep the diner out of it, but…”

“We can’t relocate anywhere.” Bruce had come up out of the basement, looking upset, and Cecil immediately went to him. He accepted the hug with a sigh and let himself be led around the counter to a stool of his own; Dean got up, but the scientist caught his arm before he could go anywhere. “No, if one of us wants something we’ll get it ourselves, Dean – this isn’t work, it’s family.” Dean goggled at him, dropping back onto the stool, and Bruce actually smiled. “Welcome to it, yeah. Once Tony accepts someone, that’s pretty much it.” The smile fell away. “Seriously, though, we can’t move Steve. He heals fast, but not that fast. A concrete block wall fell on him, my guess is they set it up to do as much damage as possible to he and Tony both – he pushed Tony out of the way, if he hadn’t neither of them would have been able to fight back when the agents showed up,” he explained. “He actually did a lot more healing than you’d probably guess on the ride out here, but the shitty government-issue car Tony stole was apparently a pretty rough ride and that didn’t do him any favors. Just laying flat and still is already helping a lot.”

“Painkillers?”

Bruce shook his head. “Don’t work on him because of his enhanced metabolism. He can’t get drunk, either – which has made for some interesting drinking games at the mansion, but screws him over big time when he’s hurt.”

Dean didn’t realize his face had given away his reaction to that until Cecil let go of Bruce and moved to hug him again. “I know,” he said quietly. “I know this is not the best way for you to find all of this out, or the way you’d have wanted what’s between the two of you to move to the next level. But sweetheart, as much as I hate to say it…if something like this hadn’t happened, he’d have never, ever let on how deep his feelings for you actually are unless you’d said something first.”

“That’s true, he wouldn’t have.” Bruce leaned forward to pat Dean’s knee. “That’s not because he doesn’t trust you, Dean; it’s because, when it comes to this kind of thing, he still doesn’t trust his own judgment.”

Dean nodded slowly, remembering what Bruce and Tony had told him about Steve’s ‘former best friend’…and thinking of his own fucked-up ‘relationship’ with Castiel. “Yeah, I can understand that. Sometimes I don’t trust mine, either.”

They sat around in the diner and watched the sun come up, Bruce going downstairs every so often to check on Steve and Dean doing his regular round of closing chores while he waited for the armored truck to show up to take the Thursday deposit. Cecil insisted on hiding Bruce’s bike in the utility shed behind the diner before that happened. “If they see two bikes, they’re going to wonder where the other rider is at,” he explained with a shrug. “They might even think it was some kind of hostage situation and call the cops – or worse, they might recognize Bruce and call someone else.”

“If they recognize Cecil, they’re just going to want autographs,” Bruce teased, making his lover blush. The scientist snickered and kissed his cheek before disappearing down into the basement for the duration, the words, “My boyfriend is Internet-famous!” drifting back up the stairs in his wake before the steel door finished closing.

Cecil sighed and rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. Sort of sappily, which made Dean smile too. The two older men just seemed to fit together, it was cute. He wondered idly if he and Steve would be like that someday. “Of course you will,” Cecil said, startling him. He wasn’t looking at Dean, though; he was looking off into some middle distance outside again, this time in the direction of the highway. “The truck is coming, but something seems off to me. I think we need to be really careful not to give them the idea that anything is out of the ordinary.”

Dean raised an eyebrow. “Where’s Clint?”

“He won’t get here until late tonight.” Cecil turned back around and took another sip of his soda. “If I think it’s necessary, I’ll leave while the truck is here. I can go back to the power station and grab some necessities for Bruce and I, and he can let me in when I get back – you’ll be asleep by then.” He raised an eyebrow of his own when Dean started to object to that. “Of course you will be, Dean. You have to be with-it tonight to run the diner, and that’s not going to happen if you’re sleep-deprived.”

When the armored truck pulled in some fifteen minutes later, the driver and guard were two men Dean had never seen before. He allowed his puzzlement – and worry – to show. “Hey. Where’s Joe? He’s okay, right?”

“Out sick,” the guy told him. “The flu or something was what they told me. He should be back next week.” Following protocol, he put down his tablet and laid his company ID next to it, then used his scanner on the plastic hospital-type bracelet locked around his wrist; his identification and current route assignment at once popped up on the tablet’s screen.

Dean checked the screen against the ID and signed off on it on the tablet, then got the deposit bag out of the safe and handed it over with the deposit slip. The driver carefully verified the contents of the bag, then had Dean sign the slip before tucking it into the bag and putting on the tiny lock which would secure the zipper until the bag arrived at the bank. Cecil, meanwhile, had finished his soda and pushed the empty glass away, standing up. “Well, that’s it for me,” he said, stretching. “Any chance you’ll have a banana cream pie next week sometime, Dean?”

Dean smiled at him. “My Monday regulars don’t like banana, but if you come back on Wednesday I’ll thaw one out for you.”

“See you on Wednesday, then.” Cecil sauntered out of the diner and got on his bike, putting on his helmet and then speeding off towards home with a little cloud of dust following him.

The armored truck driver didn’t appear to have paid much attention to this byplay, but Dean noticed that the guard in the armored truck watched Cecil leave instead of watching what was going on in the diner itself. Not good. “You guys need coffee or anything?” Dean asked the driver. He always asked Joe that question, too. “I’ve got about half a pot left, it’s yours if you want it – I’ll just have to pour it out, otherwise.”

“No, we’re good – thanks, though. We’ll see you on the next pickup if Joe’s not back to work by then.”

“Sure thing, man.” Dean walked him to the door, locked it and flipped the Closed sign once he was out, and then started pulling down the heavy roller shades that kept the diner from turning into an EZ-Bake oven during the day. And then he went back behind the counter and finished closing up the way he usually did, because spooks that good were bound to have thermal imaging or infrared or something, ‘watching’ him to see if he did anything unusual once he was supposedly alone in the diner. Dean knew he’d been right about that when he didn’t hear the armored truck leave until he’d finished his second bowl of cereal and started washing up his and Cecil’s dishes in the sink. He puttered around for a little bit longer, just in case they came back, and then headed down into the basement the way he normally would have.

Bruce took in what Dean had to say about the replacement armored car guys with a frown, but he shook his head when Dean expressed some worry about Cecil being out by himself in the middle of nowhere as he went out to the power station and back. “He’d see them coming long before they ever saw him,” he said, and smiled just slightly. “Not just because of the extra eye, either.”

“Yeah, about that…”

The scientist held up a hand. “It’s a long story. And I get…angry when I think about how it happened, which would not be a good thing right now.” He peeled himself up out of the chair he’d been sitting in and patted Dean on the shoulder. “I’m gonna go upstairs and wait for Cecil to get back while you get some sleep. If Steve wakes up – which I really doubt he will – come up and get me.”

“Shouldn’t I watch…”

“No, you need to sleep,” Bruce insisted. “Because I need you to be awake and alert tonight when Cecil and I are asleep, we’re all going to take turns being the first line of defense in case trouble shows up here looking to reproduce – us during the day, you and Clint at night. And Clint actually knows how to be a short-order cook, so you can pass him off to your regulars as someone you’re training to fill in when you go on vacation.”

“Vacation?”

Bruce laughed. “Since your boyfriend currently lives in a fully-staffed mansion with its own private beach in Malibu? Visiting him would definitely count as a vacation – we’ll all go, you’ll have fun.” He started up the stairs. “I mean it, go to sleep!”

“Yes Mother!” Dean called up after him, smiling when more laughter floated back down in reply before the steel upper door closed. He considered for a minute, then got his spare set of sheets and the blanket it almost never got cold enough to use and made himself a relatively nice fake sleeping bag on the floor in front of the chair; next to the bed would have seemed to be the logical spot, but from that close he couldn’t easily see Steve. Not to mention, being off to the side meant someone coming down the stairs wouldn’t see him right at first. Normally when Dean was in the basement he locked the door from the inside so that wouldn’t be an issue, but locking it now wasn’t an option because Bruce might need to get in and Dean probably wouldn’t hear if he knocked.

He took his shower and put on a pair of sweats and a t-shirt, but instead of going right to the sleeping spot he’d made he went to the bed and sat down on the side of it, just looking at Steve. Who did already look a lot better, blood all cleaned off and bruises already noticeably faded – the swollen-shut eye was even almost back to normal. Dean couldn’t help but remember the way the one unswollen blue eye had looked up at him earlier that morning, and he shuddered. He knew Cecil was right: If Steve hadn’t been so badly hurt, if the situation hadn’t been so fucked-up and desperate…Steve would never have said a god-damned word unless Dean had said something first. Technically even in this situation he hadn’t said anything, he’d just been hurting and upset and scared and the only thing he’d wanted was Dean. And Tony the Tech Guy – Tony fucking Stark, one of the richest, smartest men in the whole goddamn world – had risked himself to make that happen because he’d known how important Dean was to Steve and at least suspected the feeling was mutual. Dean figured the rest of the team had already told him they were sure Dean felt the same way, but Tony seemed to him like the kind of guy who always had to see for himself. After all, he’d driven all the way out to the Last Chance just to make sure Dean wasn’t a homophobic shithead like Barnes. Who was apparently a ‘cyborg assassin’, which made Dean wonder just how much damage the bastard had done to Steve before and what it was a tiny little scientist guy like Bruce had up his sleeve that made him outclass a cyborg assassin so badly Steve had been forced to pull him off to keep him from killing the guy.

Steve shifted in his sleep, making a pained noise, but when Dean brushed at his hair and shushed him he sighed and relaxed again. Dean looked at the golden strands tangled around his fingers with a certain amount of awed disbelief. America’s Golden Boy, Captain fucking America, much-beloved leader of a team of people just as special as he was. Was in love with him, Dean Winchester, butt monkey of supernatural beings everywhere, only valuable to his own father because baby brother Sammy had needed backup protection just in case. Had fallen in love with Dean, no less…when Dean hadn’t been doing anything but being himself. Hadn’t even been trying or anything. Steve loved Dean just because he was Dean.

And for the first time in years, Dean Winchester let himself cry.

Chapter Text

In a shabby living room in a really boring suburban level of Hell, more specifically in the part of Hell reserved for people who fell into the re-education end of punishment, John Winchester sank back in his worn recliner, miserably watching his oldest son cry. He’d heard every thought – he always did when it was something like this, because having to witness what he’d done to Dean play out had been his punishment ever since he’d died. Giving up his own life to save his son’s had mitigated his punishment to that, if mitigated was the right word since John wasn’t so sure physical torture would be worse than feeling every fucked-up thing Dean felt, every doubt and fear and hurt, every bitter memory, every pang of loss. Every problem John had personally caused, he got to experience the end-results of now.

But of course, that wasn’t all of his punishment. Suburban-Hell was boring as fuck, and John was ‘retired’ and couldn’t actually leave his yard anyway, so he was depressed and guilty and bored. He had television, but the only thing it ever showed was the Dean Winchester Channel and John was only able to take so much of that at a time. Sam at least got to leave five days a week – they had him doing paperwork because even in Hell that was apparently a thing – but every evening he was back and every weekend he was stuck in the house with John. Living with Sam and experiencing the other end of his parental fuckups was a kind of torture all by itself, which of course was why Sam lived with him.

John actually took a small bit of consolation from knowing that it was torture for Sam, too.

He watched Dean until he just couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he got out of his chair and went outside into the front yard. He had considered fixing and painting the leaning picket fence out there, but he hadn’t gotten to it yet. And he kind of thought Bobby should help him with it, since the fence was between their two yards. Of course, Bobby did not agree with him about that, because Bobby had turned into a miserable bastard somewhere along the line and on most days civil conversation was beyond him. He was out in his yard now, though, sitting near the fence in his wheelchair, so John ambled over. “Hey Bobby.”

“Fuck off, Winchester.”

John ignored that – coming from Bobby, it was practically a cheery good-morning anyway. “Dean met someone.”

Bobby raised an eyebrow. Dean was something he was always interested in, and about the only common ground he was willing to have with John. “Someone new?”

“New might not be the word I’d use. You know those people who keep visiting his diner? Turns out they’re a team of fucking superheroes and their leader, his artist buddy, is none other than Captain America. As in helped save the world from Nazis in World War 2 Captain America.” He leaned on the fence, carefully so it wouldn’t fall over. “Of course, he’s not Captain America when he’s at the diner, he’s just Steve the artist. And it turns out he’s in love with Dean, and Dean decided he loves him back.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Nope.”

Bobby’s jaw set. “I taught him better than that. It’s against the natural order!”

That startled John into standing upright again, away from the dubious support of the peeling gray fence. “What?”

Bobby scowled at him. “It’s against the natural order,” he said more slowly, like he was talking to a child or someone too stupid to understand him. “It’s wrong, you know that.”

John shook his head. “No, I meant…what do you mean, ‘you taught him better’? Dean wasn’t…” And then, all at once, he got it. “Oh shit, Dean was. Son of a bitch, all those girls…”

“He’s a good boy, knew when to take correction,” Bobby said, sounding proud. “Once I sat him down and drummed the right way into him he never slipped again.” He shook his head, though. “Youngest I’ve ever seen that sort of wrongness come on someone, he was…twelve? Maybe eleven, not quite sure. Really young for it, though, really young.”

“Christ.” John felt sick. He knew he came off as a ‘man’s man’, and kind of a hardass about it, but he’d known plenty of guys and even women who weren’t straight and it had never really bothered him. He’d even known a couple of Marines who’d been keeping it under the military radar when he’d been in the service – hell, he’d even covered for them a couple of times. But his son…

…Had been left to be mostly raised by Bobby. Who was a good man, no two ways about that, but who John really had always known had some outdated ideas about right and wrong. And Dean had been eleven, maybe twelve. Way too young to hold out against an adult, especially one he loved and needed as much as Bobby. Because Bobby had been the daddy in that situation. It had probably never even crossed Dean’s mind to bring the subject up with John – hell, he’d probably thought that John would hurt him if he said anything. John had hurt him for lesser things than that, after all.

All those girls. Dean had taken Bobby’s correction to heart…and he’d over-corrected. For years upon years, denying who he was so Bobby wouldn’t reject him, so John wouldn’t discard him, because they’d been the only foundation Dean had. John could only imagine how much that had hurt his son, could see very clearly how much Dean had sacrificed to hold on to the only stability he’d ever had and the one thing John had told him was more important than anything else, his family.

Part of him wanted to blame Bobby, but John actually knew better than that now thanks to years of boredom with nothing better to do than think about his old life. Bobby hadn’t done anything wrong; he’d been given the daddy job and he’d taken it, that was all. John was the one who’d left his sons with Bobby while he was hunting, let another man who wasn’t him and had different values than he did raise them. He was the one who’d kept their foundation tiny and shaky, eventually turning Sam rebellious and Dean fatalistic. Still, though…he stepped back from the fence and shook his head. “Bobby, I…I want to be pissed at you for this, but it’s my fault, not yours. I don’t believe being gay is wrong. I’d never have told one of my boys…whatever you told Dean that made him so scared he thought he had to have all the women in the world to prove he wasn’t going against the natural order. But I never told you I felt that way, and I never told Sam and Dean either.” He shook his head again. “I’m glad Dean has found someone who’s worthy of him, Bobby. I’m glad he’s found someone who loves him, someone who will understand him, someone who’ll be able to keep up with him and who wants the same things he wants. If I were there, if I could talk to him, I’d give them both my blessing.”

Bobby just stared at him. And then something happened that drew John’s attention away from the other man before anything else could be said: The sun came out.

In the whole time he’d been in Suburban Hell, it had always been either gray and overcast or night, once or twice there’d been fog, but he’d never once seen the sun. Now, though, it came out from behind the clouds and a bright ray fell in John’s yard. He stepped farther away from the fence, stepping into it. It was warm. It felt good. He felt good.

Had his grass always been that green?

Bobby was demanding to know what was the matter with him, John was ignoring him, and then a delivery demon strolled in through the yard’s gate. It smiled, showing a jagged double-row of teeth. “Congratulations, Mr. Winchester, looks like you made it out of the ‘burbs.” It handed over an envelope. “Report to the office, they’ll sort out where you go next. And we’ll get a new neighbor for Mr. Singer, don’t worry.”

John looked over his shoulder at Bobby, then back at the demon. “He can’t see it, can he?”

“Nope. He won’t see it until he’s learned his lesson, those are the rules. Now go on, you know where the office is – your youngest works there, after all.”

John started to say he didn’t know…and then he realized that he did. Huh. He nodded to the demon, who nodded back and disappeared in a puff of oily smoke, then turned back to look at the scowling man on the other side of the whitewashed fence who had been a friend of his once, who had helped raise his sons and loved them like they were his own. “Bobby, I…I hope you’ll pull your head out of your ass and follow me someday soon,” he said, and then he turned toward the gate and walked through it and on up the narrow street without looking back again.

The ‘office’ looked pretty much like any other boring cookie-cutter office building on Earth, and the receptionist was polite but appeared to be suffering from a terminal case of boredom which John’s appearance had done nothing to dispel. “He’s in his office,” she told John when he approached her desk, waving a hand to indicate the corridor to his left. “You can go on back, I’m sure he’s waiting for you.”

Sammy had an office? “Thanks,” John told her, and she flicked her forked black tongue at him by way of response. The walls in the corridor had bland motivational posters in minimalistic black frames between each nondescript door, and finally he came to a door with a little sliding-frame plaque that said ‘Sam Winchester’ on it. John frowned at the plaque, knocked perfunctorily, and then opened the door.

His youngest son was sitting behind a desk that was piled high with papers and files in stacks around a computer, and he waved without looking up. “Come on in, Dad. I just need to finish this up and then I’ll be right with you.”

John came in, shutting the door behind him, and sat down in the chair across from the desk. There was a plaque on the desk, too, only this one said ‘Sam Winchester’ and below that ‘Senior Manager, Accounts Payable’. “You’re an accountant? In Hell?”

“Something like that.” Sam finished what he was doing and looked up. “You have your letter?”

“Yeah, the messenger gave it to me.” John handed the envelope over, watching as Sam opened it and then spent a moment looking it over and nodding. “Sammy, did you know your brother was…”

“Bi, not gay,” was Sam’s response. He pulled a folder from the top of a stack and flipped it open, scanning through the contents and then adding the letter to them before closing the folder again. “Steve’s the same, if you’re wondering. Neither one of them really dislikes being with a woman, they just like being with another man better.”

That made John feel a little bit better, knowing that Dean hadn’t been fighting his natural inclinations quite as much as he’d originally thought. “So you already knew…”

“I figured it out, a long time ago.” He shrugged. “I never could get Dean to talk about it, of course – took me a while, but I finally figured out that was because he was afraid I’d get pissed and use it as ammunition. Which I probably would have, since I didn’t realize for way too long that Bobby was the source of that problem, not you. Between the two of you and me, though, Dean was scared to actually talk about anything with anyone.”

John nodded, accepting that explanation. He’d never been able to drum the going off half-cocked because you got mad thing out of Sammy the way he had Dean – but then, he’d had more time to train Dean, back when Sammy had still been a baby and John hadn’t dared to leave him with anyone for fear the demon would come back. “So what now? What comes after suburbia?”

“Depends on the person,” Sam told him, sitting back in his own chair. It was a very nice padded leather office chair with a high back, the kind an executive would have – or a senior manager, apparently. “There are other rehabilitation levels – don’t ever volunteer to go to Hell’s version of Florida, that one’s so bad even the demons cringe when you mention it. And there are protection details that operate topside, sort of like a working probation for people who qualify. We have one of those about to go up that you’d fit into pretty well, but first you have some retraining to do.” He waved at John’s physique, which was actually the Suburban Hell lack-thereof. “Or maybe more than some.”

John sighed. “Boot camp?” Sam shrugged. “Yeah, okay, I can do that – did it once already, after all. So where is this going to happen?” A door appeared in the wall, splintered and fading Army green with the words “BOOT CAMP” stenciled on it in black. “Convenient.” He frowned. “You gonna be okay?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “I work here, Dad – I’m part of the management structure, not a detainee. I volunteered to live with you part-time so I could keep an eye on how things were going.” He made a face. “Bobby…well, I still have hope. He’s pissed that he’s in Hell,” he explained. “And a few other things that are his business, not yours, but right now that’s the big one. Once he accepts that he’s just like everyone else here – and I mean that in a good way, mostly – he’ll get to move on to the next level too.” He waved at the door. “Go on, your trainer is waiting and he’s…not a patient guy. He’s gonna put you through hell.”

John smiled. “Like I said, already did boot camp once – it’s supposed to be hell, that’s how you learn. Come back here once I’m done?”

“Yeah.” They both stood up, and Sam came around the side of the desk and gave him a hug. “Now go on, you’ve got to get this out of the way before you can move on.”

“Sure.” John let go, ruffled the too-long hair, and then walked through the green door with a confident stride, without looking back.

The minute he’d gone through, the stenciled words on the door that closed behind him changed to read LESSON 2. Crowley popped into the room with a disbelieving, almost horrified expression on his face, looking from Sam to the door and back. “Are you trying to take my job again? I know you get pissed at the man, but you just sent your father…”

“This isn’t because he’s my father,” Sam cut him off. “He started ‘training’ Dean at five, Crowley.” Sam’s voice was hard, and his pupils had gone back to being their usual fire-filled black. “He’s learned a lot, but he still doesn’t think there was anything wrong with that – he sat right here in front of me and thought about it being a good thing, in fact. He has to pay his debt.”

Crowley nodded. Their new system could be harsh, but it was indisputably fair. Even for the people who got sent to Florida.

On the other side of the door, John Winchester had found himself standing in a dry, open area that looked a lot like Kansas and not so much like a military base. He also found himself suddenly a whole lot shorter, and when a man in fatigues approached him it was a long way to look up. The man, middle-aged and bearded, was scowling down at him. “Fuck, really? You really…okay, yeah, I guess you did. No wonder the kid could fight like that, he’s never known anything else. You’re a bastard, but not as sick as some of what’s come through that door. I’m Cain,” he introduced himself. “And until I say otherwise, Winchester…you are lower than dog shit and twice as useless. Now drop and give me twenty.” He leaned down, smiling, his eyes completely black. “This isn’t so much a lesson as it is payback – you have a debt to pay, and I’m here to squeeze every last drop of it out of your sorry ass. And just so you know, for when you want to start feeling sorry for yourself because of what a bastard I’m being to poor little you…I won’t do a damned thing to you that you didn’t do to your oldest son. Be glad you don’t have to pay for the younger one too, when they come to work down here that slate gets wiped. Now drop and give me fucking twenty before it becomes thirty, crybaby. This is for your own good, after all – and the faster you learn, the quicker you’ll grow.”

Back in Suburban Hell, Bobby Singer opened his front door warily in response to an unusually polite knock…and blinked at the familiar face of the dark-haired man on the porch. “What the hell…how can you even be down here?!”

The younger man shook his head. “That wasn’t me, Mr. Singer,” he said, and held out his hand. “My name is Jimmy, and I’m here to be your aide – the office decided you could use some help. I’m living in the house next door, but I’ll be over here every day to try to make things better for you.”

Bobby scowled, ignoring the offered hand. “I don’t need any help.”

“You’ll get used to me,” Jimmy assured him. He stepped inside with a smile, ignoring the way the wheelchair-bound man tried to block the narrow entry, and closed the door behind him. “Want to go into the living room? You have TV now – two channels instead of the one channel Mr. Winchester was allowed to watch. And a DVR so you don’t have to miss anything - I’ll let you decide which one you want to record when.” He did something, and suddenly Bobby found himself facing the opposite direction and being pushed into his living room and parked in front of a brand-new television set with a blinking black box underneath it. The screen flared into life and he saw a small, dimly-lit room, sort of like a small windowless bedroom with one young man asleep on a narrow bed and another sleeping on a pallet on the floor. Light spilled down the stairs, and a tall man with white hair and glasses peered down into the room, seemed satisfied everything was as it should be, and then retreated and took the light with him. Bobby scowled again, recognizing the dark-haired man sleeping on the floor and making an educated guess as to the identity of the blond on the bed. “I don’t want to watch this one.”

“You can watch whichever one you want,” Jimmy reminded him, handing over a remote with two blue buttons marked 1 and 2 and two unmarked red buttons below them. “Blue to watch, red to record. You’re on Channel 1 right now. Channel 2 is a new one, so I don’t know a whole lot about it. I’ll just go make us an early supper while you explore.”

He retreated to the kitchen door and stayed there, mostly out of sight, waiting. Sure enough, after a few minutes of silence which started confused and worked their way up through angry to horrified, the older man exclaimed, “What the…Winchester?”

Jimmy retreated the rest of the way into the kitchen and glanced out the window; one of the leaning pickets on the rickety fence outside had straightened up about halfway. He smiled. It was a promising start.

Chapter Text

Bruce prowled around in the diner, bored and not above snooping now that he was able to do it with impunity. He found pictures Steve had drawn for Dean, he found one of Tony’s blank white cards, he found a restaurant supply catalog and sat down to thumb through it, killing time, trying not to worry. About Tony, mostly, because he hadn’t called or texted yet. Cecil he wasn’t too worried about, because Cecil could take care of himself about as well as Bruce could.

And for about the same reason, too. That thought made him wince, and he got up again and puttered around to make himself some tea – luckily he’d thought to grab some on his way out of the power station, because the decaf teabags the diner stocked weren’t anything he really wanted to drink. Once he had the tea made, though, and had sat back down with the catalog, he started thinking about it again anyway. He was going to have to tell the others the truth about Cecil, and soon, but he wasn’t sure how. Because some of it was kind of personal, some of it was really personal…and honestly, Bruce had gotten used to being incredibly private, and to having Cecil all to himself. Sharing was something he usually only did when he was mad.

Or at least it had been, before Cecil. His lover was a wonderful, patient man…who absolutely was not afraid of Bruce at all and wouldn’t hesitate to call him on it if he thought Bruce was being too stubborn and reclusive for his own good. Which was actually what had forced Bruce to confide in Cecil the first time, a few months after he’d started coming out to the power station to see him. The more Bruce had gone out there, the closer he and Cecil had started to get…and it had been scaring the hell out of him. Because Cecil hadn’t known about the Hulk, and Bruce hadn’t known how to tell him. How do you tell your best friend’s widower, who you can tell is ready to move on and is thinking he’d like to do it with you…how do you tell that oh-so-special man that you’re a monster?

Bruce had tried, he really had. He’d beaten around the bush until there wasn’t a bush anymore. He’d hinted that he’d done terrible things, he’d alluded to trying to end the problem multiple times and failing, he’d talked about years spent running, hiding…and never once gotten anything but sympathy, understanding, and acceptance. And more interest, which had bothered him on a whole different level. Cecil was a good man, the only thing ‘bad’ about him was his sense of humor, which was weird and kind of warped and could get more than a little mean if he was in a bad mood. And Bruce had never thought Cecil was attracted to ‘bad boys’, because Carlos definitely hadn’t been one of those – even Bruce hadn’t been one before and knew he still didn’t come off as one. He was, though, and he just couldn’t imagine that Cecil would want anything else to do with him once he was able to get that point across.

Which, of course, was the real reason why Bruce had been having so much trouble bringing it up: He hadn’t wanted to lose Cecil, because he’d been falling in love with Cecil. And the whole thing had just seemed impossible.

Going out to the diner that night for dinner had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, one Bruce had mainly made because he’d started to think Cecil was losing weight. So out they went, Cecil reluctant, Bruce nervous. But it had been fine. Dean – now there, Bruce thought, was a former bad boy – had immediately put Cecil at ease. Which had put Bruce at ease, until the topic of what to drink had come up and hit him right in the middle of the insecurity that was his constant companion. Verbally, he’d stumbled.

And Cecil had snapped at him. Not meanly, no, but in a tone that meant business – Bruce had heard Cecil use that tone on Carlos a few times, he knew it meant business. And then the minute Dean had turned around, after Bruce, shocked, had given in, Cecil had given him a sad, serious smile and a hug that had meant a whole lot of things.

And in that moment, Bruce had known; tonight was the night. He couldn’t put it off any longer.

In spite of his decision, it turned out to be harder than he’d expected; the more he tried to explain his situation to Cecil after they got back to the power station, the less Cecil understood what he was trying to say. Bruce wasn’t sure which one of them was at fault, he suspected it was both of them in tandem. Finally, he just gave up trying to explain, shoulders slumping in defeat. He hadn’t wanted to do it this way. “I…you...you don’t understand.” He rubbed a hand across his eyes, feeling tired and depressed. “I’ll show you. I know you’ll want me to leave afterwards, but…but just trust me, I won’t hurt you. He won’t hurt you, I promise.”

And then he kicked his shoes off and pulled off his socks. His shirt joined them, then his pants, leaving him just wearing what looked like spandex swim trunks. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground – he was blushing, all over – while he moved the little pile of clothing out of the way. And then he slumped again, lifted squeezed shut eyes to the sky…and changed. And the Hulk roared in pain and anger.

Cecil stood there, openmouthed. He hadn’t been sure what was going on when Bruce had started taking off his clothes – he’d expected to see really horrible scars, or signs of some awful disease, something normal. This was not normal.

But of course, neither was Cecil – he just didn’t think like a ‘normal’ person. Carlos, his beloved Carlos, had loved that about him.

Cecil approached the warily watching green monster cautiously, but with a look of absolute dismay on his face. “Oh my god, did you just hurt yourself to show me this?” he demanded. “Did that hurt? It looked like it hurt…” He walked right up to the Hulk, reaching up to take the broad green face in his hands so he could look into gamma-green eyes, probing, looking for his friend. “Bruce, oh god, Bruce, can you even talk after that? Are you okay? Please, let me know you’re okay, please.”

And that was when something unexpected happened. For the first time ever since the accident, Bruce Banner’s mind woke up and looked out at the world through the Hulk’s eyes. He blinked at his honestly distressed friend and surprised himself by nodding. He cleared his throat in a guttural rumble. “I…can talk.”

Cecil’s eyes filled up with tears. “Oh Bruce, I’m so, so sorry,” he said. And then he threw his arms as far around the Hulk’s massive chest as they would go and hugged him.

Bruce hugged him back, gently, surprised all over again that minding his strength wasn’t hard, that moving this body so unlike his own felt…natural. He cleared his throat again. “I…it’s okay, Cecil.” He even more gently patted his friend’s back. “It’s okay, really. I’m…okay. Please don’t be upset.”

Cecil sniffed. “It hurt you to change, I could tell. You had to hurt yourself to get me to listen.”

“No, no.” Thick green fingers ruffled white hair, and Bruce marveled that he could actually feel…well, everything, just like he would in his human body. “I…honestly, it just hurts for a second and then I usually don’t remember anything until I wake up again. And I knew I had to show you anyway, there’s just no good way to verbally explain…this, you know?”

A wet chuckle; Cecil swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand and sniffed again. “I can see where people might not get the…size of the problem if you didn’t show them,” he admitted. He stroked the nearest green bicep with his other hand. “This is…this is something else.”

“Yeah, it is.” Bruce very gently moved him aside and then sat down on the ground, putting them at closer to eye level. He stretched out one green arm, looking at the way the muscles moved under the thick skin. “I…I’ve never…I didn’t think I could ever be in control of this.”

Cecil cocked his head, puzzled. “How could you not be in control of your own body?”

It clicked, and Bruce smiled. “Because I wasn’t thinking of it as my own body, I was thinking of it as a monster trapped inside of me – a monster I was always trying to either imprison or kill.” Another chuckle, and he spontaneously pulled Cecil in for another careful hug. “There aren’t words to describe how awesome what you just did for me was, you know that? After all these years…you’re the first person who’s ever managed to wake me up.”

Cecil, to his surprise, squirmed a little, although he didn’t pull out of the hug. “Um, yeah, about that…there’s something I need to tell you, too. You know the research that did this to you?” Bruce rumbled a confused acknowledgement. “Yeah, well…it did something to me, too.”

And that was when he pushed back his long bangs and looked up at Bruce. With three brown eyes, which all blinked at the same time and then slowly started shading purple. Which was right about the time the tentacles made their appearance – purple, translucent, but Bruce could feel them. He frowned, lifting one that wrapped around one of his fingers so he could get a better look. It wasn’t regular matter, it almost felt like he imagined plasmoids would feel if you could touch them…and it felt like Cecil. He rubbed the tentacle gently between his huge fingers, and the other man shivered. “Sorry, I’m just…Cecil, how? I know Carlos was working on it too, but it couldn’t have done this. He couldn’t have done this.”

Cecil sniffed, shaking his head. “He didn’t. His serum…Steve Carlsburg contaminated it, on purpose. There wasn’t any way Carlos could have known. So he gave me the dose he had prepared…and this happened.” He cocked his head. With the white hair and glowing eyes and the halo of ethereal tentacles, he looked unearthly and beautiful and lost. And the soft touch of the tentacles conveyed a sweet melancholy and…something else, something almost hopeful. “I think I’m immortal, Bruce. Carlos thought…he didn’t know where they got it, but he speculated it was biological material from an extradimensional being your jailers had caught.” He blinked again. “I’m not getting any older, not changing at all. And I can do…things now. Things humans can’t do.”

Bruce stroked his hair. “You were always special,” he said, and tucked the white head against his massive chest again. Tentacles wrapped around his arms and wrists, reciprocating. “Now you’re just more special. And you’ll always have me, because…well, every time I change back, the serum resets my cells to their exact state at the moment of the accident.” A rough chuckle. “Luckily I was having a good week.”

A sigh. “I was dying – heart condition, even surgery would only have given me a ten percent chance of living for a few more years. So he risked it, and he kept the other vial of serum – even though he knew it was contaminated – and he was going to take it as soon as that last project was finished, he was going to join me.” A shuddering breath. “Carlsburg tried to blackmail him – his bosses wanted the serum research, and they knew Carlos had tested it so Carlsburg demanded his test subject too. He didn’t know…but Carlos knew he had to stop them before they found out, and he knew he was out of time. He faked a lab accident to get rid of Carlsburg and all the evidence, he knew he’d die too…but he did it to save me, from them.”

Bruce shuddered. “Was it SHIELD?” The wet nod against his chest made him want to roar, but he didn’t. Instead he flipped the switch he’d never realized was his to flip and shrank back down to human. It hurt, a lot, but Cecil’s tentacles stayed wrapped around him and a soft touch slipped inside his mind, soothing, supporting him through the pain until it was over. Worry was evident when he lifted Bruce’s head so he could look into his eyes again, purple glow receding and taking the tentacles with it, although the extra eye stayed where it was. Bruce smiled at him and raised his hands – shaking, just a bit – to wrap over Cecil’s. “For me too. They were ‘nudging’ the general who caused my accident. They went after everyone who was doing serum research, I found out later – some comments I heard in their labs tipped me off. Someone up high apparently made the decision that all of the serum research needed to be under SHIELD’s control, no exceptions. I went looking, all over the world…but everywhere I went, they’d gotten there before I did, or at the same time I did.” He ducked his head. “I…I avenged some of our friends and colleagues, anyway, even if it wasn’t entirely on purpose. They paid for killing them, even though it was mostly in property damage.”

“Actually, that sounds kind of fun,” Cecil told him. This time he ran his fingers through Bruce’s hair, playing with the dark curls. “If you do that again, can I watch?” Bruce looked up at him in surprise, and all three eyes fluttered their lashes at him. “Please?”

Bruce couldn’t help it, he actually laughed. And for the first time since he’d started coming out to the power station, to Cecil, he gave in to temptation and took a kiss. “Yes, you can watch.”

Bruce startled awake when the diner’s door rattled, hearing laughter in his head that wasn’t his. He peeled himself out of the booth and went to open the door, getting an armful of his lover and a kiss that made him really, really regret that they weren’t at home. “We’ll tell them the whole story when the time is right,” Cecil told him, ruffling his hair. “Now come on, help me get our stuff inside and then I’m going to put my bike in the shed with yours and Dean’s.”

“Dean’s?”

“Yup, Dean’s – I had wondered what his escape plan was, if he ever had to leave the diner, and when I saw that restored beauty under a tarp in the shed I knew I was looking at it. We’ll have to get him to go riding with us sometime.” Another kiss. “Now come on, work before play. I brought the book you’ve been reading, and I could use some chocolate milk.”

Bruce reluctantly let him go. “I love you.”

Cecil looked back over his shoulder and winked. “I know.”

Chapter Text

Dean woke up around his usual time, and was somewhat startled to find Bruce and Cecil both in the room. Cecil was sitting in the chair, Bruce was sitting on the side of the bed, and Steve was still asleep. “Shh,” Cecil cautioned in a low voice. “We have visitors topside, sniffing around. Persistent little bastards, I’ll give them that.”

Dean blinked at him, then shook his head, got up and went to the bathroom. When he came back out he stretched and pulled on his sneakers. “All right, I’m gonna go upstairs to kick on the air conditioner and go for my run around the perimeter, the way I usually do. If I see someone hanging around out there, I’ll handle that the way I usually do, too.”

“It’s the armored truck,” Cecil told him. “Same guys as this morning.”

Dean grinned. “Even better – I can call that in. They’re not supposed to be here, and if the company had needed something they’d have called the diner to tell me to expect them. Just sit tight, I’ll be back down in a bit.”

He jogged up the stairs and let himself out of the basement, following his usual routine of getting the air conditioner started and then opening the shade on the middle window to look outside. He contrived to do a double-take when he saw the armored truck, and frowned for real when he noticed it was empty. Shit. He ducked back behind the counter and picked up the phone, dialing the company. “Hey, this is Dean Winchester out at the Last Chance Diner on Highway 49? Yeah, I just got up and your truck is out front, and I don’t see anybody in it. No, I was about to go for my run. Not going out there now, though – those guys have guns, I don’t. The guy this morning for the deposit was Tim Jones, he knew the protocol and his ID checked out…DEA, really?” He snorted. “No, but I’m guessing they’re lookin’ for that guy up the road, few miles from here, has an RV out in the middle of nowhere. Oh yeah, all my regulars know – they’ve been taking bets on how long it would take someone to bust the guy and whether he’d blow himself up first, someone must have got tired of waiting and called him in. No, of course they didn’t, can you blame them? You don’t mess around with drug dealers. Yeah…yeah, I’d appreciate it if you did that for me, thanks Donna. It did not make my evening to look out the window and see what looked like an armored car heist going down in front of the diner…yeah, exactly.”

She was talking to the driver now – the armored truck guys had military-grade communications, kind of like Steve’s team did – and she cut back in with Dean to ask a question. “Yeah, a buddy of mine is here…no, he’s still asleep. No, not for these assholes, no. If they want to ask questions, they can drop the James Bond crap and come out here in a fed car with their real badges and talk to me during working hours. But anyone in the area would be more than happy to point them to the RV cooker, we don’t want that kind of crap out here. No, all I know is that it’s somewhere between here and the Conoco on the west end of the highway, and they said sometimes he has a boytoy out there with him. Yeah…yeah, okay, thanks.”

He hung up, got himself a glass of milk and sat behind the counter until the two supposed DEA guys got back in the truck they’d appropriated and drove off. Then and only then did Dean unlock the back door and go outside. He was back in a few minutes later, scowling, and went back to the phone, calling the armored truck company again. “Hey Donna, it’s Dean again. Tell those two bastards they owe the diner a new lock, since they cut off the one on the storage shed out back. No, I know it was them – the cut’s still hot. And there’s also this thing called a search warrant, might be a concept they should check out. Yeah…no Donna, I’m not blaming you guys, if the feds say jump I know you have to say how high. Yeah…yeah, honestly, I think you should call your boss, fill him in – who knows where else those guys have been today with the truck. Hopefully they’ll actually turn in our deposit, we had a pretty good week. Yeah…yeah, you too, thanks again.”

Dean finished his milk and went outside again. He made a quick circuit of the perimeter, checking the wards just in case – he didn’t expect a couple of spooks to know about stuff like that, but you never knew. He seriously doubted the two of them were DEA, but maybe just to make it look good they’d bust the weirdo in the RV, which would make a lot of his regulars happy. Then he went back to the shed and looked around a little better. Cecil and Bruce’s bikes seemed to be fine, and the tarp over Dean’s had been pulled up on one side – it was an older bike he’d bought from Luke’s kid brother and fixed up, just so if he ever did need to leave the diner for some reason he wouldn’t have to walk or bum a ride. He took one last look around and then left the shed, careful not to touch the cut lock, and went back into the diner by the back door. He called Luke, wanting to be sure the local boys knew there were ‘DEA agents’ out running around in their neck of the woods and telling them about the cut lock and the fact that he had a buddy out visiting him. Luke very pointedly asked him if that would be the tattoo-artist buddy they’d all been taking bets was more than a buddy, and Dean’s response had been yes and to please let him know who the winner of said bet was so he could charge that person double for their coffee the next time they came in. Which was an empty threat, of course, since the diner didn’t charge the patrol guys for coffee and never had, but Luke said he’d let Dean know and someone would drop by later with a lock Dean could borrow for the shed and an evidence bag to put the cut lock into for him, and Dean thanked him and hung up, chuckling. He really liked Luke and the boys – even though they were technically the State Patrol, they were still very much a station of small-town country cops.

Of course, since they were coming and they knew Steve was there, Steve was going to have to come upstairs at some point so they could see him and give them both shit about hooking up. Tomorrow, maybe – tonight he could probably get around it by telling them Steve was sleeping. But if one of them recognized him…

Bruce came padding up out of the basement and slapped him on the shoulder. “Cecil says stop thinking so hard, you’re giving him a headache. And Steve wears a mask when he’s working, nobody’s ever figured it out yet so I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Dean raised an eyebrow at him. “What about you?”

Bruce smiled. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that, either – I’ve got an even better disguise than Steve does. If someone recognizes me, it’s because they already know who I am.”

Dean started to ask, but decided that when Bruce was ready to tell him, he’d tell him – or Cecil would. He got his prep work done and the diner opened, just like usual. He went with a thawed frozen cream pie instead of baking one, because it just seemed like a chocolate kind of day to him, and Cecil agreed when he came up to see about some food for Steve. “Bruce and I will come up in a little while and eat our supper with you,” he said. “After Steve has had something and gone back to sleep again – and he will, Bruce said he usually sleeps off the worst injuries. He’ll be hobbling around on that broken leg for a few more days, though, it takes bones longer than soft tissue.”

“Makes sense,” Dean agreed. He considered what he had available and compared it against the disturbing mental image he had of Steve’s original set of bruises, then made a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a milkshake. “Tonight’s special is beefsteak, but he can’t have that,” he explained to Cecil. “If he complains, tell him he can have solid food once his jaw isn’t sore anymore.”

Cecil smiled, but shook his head. “He won’t complain – honestly, he probably won’t even realize what he’s eating. He’s not going to be fully with-it until sometime tomorrow, according to Bruce.”

The rest of Dean’s evening was pretty uneventful. One of his regulars came in, and he took the opportunity to pass on the story about the DEA agents in the armored truck and how he’d sicced them on the creepy RV cooker guy. Ricky, one of the patrol guys, came by with a good lock, bagged up the cut one, and then had some coffee and a piece of pie while he gave Dean shit about having a pretty young tattoo artist for a boyfriend; Dean told him he was just jealous, which Ricky had laughingly agreed with because they were out in the middle of nowhere and pickings were pretty slim no matter which side of the fence you happened to be on. Bruce and Cecil came upstairs once Ricky left and had supper with Dean, then went back down to go to bed. And after that it got quiet for a couple of hours, which was what usually happened.

Clint pulled in around eleven that night, looking like he was missing about two days’ worth of sleep. Dean met him at the diner’s door, accepted and returned the hug, and then sat him in a booth and went back behind the counter to fix up a plate of the daily special for him. “Bruce and Cecil are asleep,” he said. “Steve’s still sleeping everything off, according to Bruce. We’ve got a couple of spooks running around pretending to be DEA agents who commandeered the armored truck that picks up the bank deposit, so I played along and set them on the dealer who’s got a little setup up the road from here. And no word from Tony yet, but Cecil says he’s okay, just had to stop to sleep for a while and didn’t want to use his phone in case they traced the signal.”

That made Clint chuckle into the coffee he was drinking, shaking his head. “I want to say I’ll never get used to him bein’ able to do that…but you know, I think I already did. He can’t see everything,” he explained. “He only sees if he’s lookin’, and then only what he’s lookin’ at. He has a sort of sense about some things, but he doesn’t usually know what he’s feelin’ until he’s had a chance to look.” He slouched back into the booth’s worn red seat a little more. “Bruce said when he noticed that angel-thing out here he cursed a blue streak, called it every name in the book and a few in books that probably ain’t been written yet.”

“He’s been watching…”

Another chuckle. “’Course he has, he and Bruce are both overprotective as hell. Steve was worried that us comin’ out here on a regular basis could get you some unfriendly attention, so Cecil said he’d keep an eye on the diner just in case. Of course, I didn’t know which eye he meant until I finally got to meet him, but I’ve seen much weirder shit than that and Bruce told me not to worry about it, so I let it go.”

“So you don’t know either?”

“Nope. And for obvious reasons, we haven’t told Tony. He’d freak and then Bruce would get pissed at him.” He saw the look, shook his head. “Yeah, I know that sounds weirder than a guy with three eyes, but trust me, Brucie-boy is not someone anyone who knows him messes with. Even though he’s never killed anyone on purpose – and believe me, there are nights when I wish I could say that.”

Dean brought the full plate out to him, squeezed his shoulder and then sat down on the other side of the booth with his own coffee. “You and me both, buddy, you and me both. Now eat, and then we’ll figure out where you’re gonna sleep because there’s only so much floor downstairs to go around....”

Chapter Text

The next morning, Cecil and Bruce came up and helped Dean with his closing chores once the shades had been pulled, ate breakfast with him, and then shooed him down into the basement; Clint was still sound asleep in the small stockroom beside the freezer. Dean checked Steve again after his shower, happy to see that most of the bruises were completely gone, and let himself run his fingers through Steve’s hair again before heading to the sleeping spot Cecil had thoughtfully re-made for him. He expected to have at least some trouble getting to sleep, but he was out within seconds of his head hitting the pillow.

When he woke up that afternoon, it was with a jolt because he’d heard Steve’s voice. He sat up, blinking. Cecil and Bruce were back in the same spots they’d been in the afternoon before, but this time Steve was sitting up. “You’re awake!”

Steve nodded, looking embarrassed. “I’m sorry for taking your bed. I’ll sleep on the floor tomorrow.”

“The hell you will,” Dean blurted out, which made Bruce dissolve into very quiet laughter. He blinked again, then rubbed his eyes and shook his head, trying to wake up faster. “Was that just you being overly polite, or do you have a head injury they didn’t tell me about?” This time Cecil cracked up too, and Steve blushed. All the way down his chest, and damned if that view wasn’t even better than Dean had imagined it would be. He rubbed his eyes again, harder this time. “Okay, I can’t look at you again until you have a shirt on, because some of me is waking up faster than the rest of me right now.” He waved a hand in the general direction of the dresser. “Top drawer, Cecil. I don’t know if my t-shirts will fit him, so an undershirt might have to do.”

“Sure thing, Dean.” Cecil peeled himself out of the chair and patted Dean’s shoulder; Bruce was still giggling. “Stop blushing, Steve; it’s adorable, but there’s no way you didn’t already know he’d appreciate the view.”

“Tony says I look like I’m on drugs.”

Bruce got control of himself. “That’s because when you come back in from swimming his manhood feels threatened and he starts to question his sexuality – his words, not mine. And no, you don’t look like you’re on steroids, men on steroids don’t have a neck.”

“Or a penis,” Cecil supplied helpfully. “Because one of the side effects of steroid abuse is a persistent case of irony.”

That even made Steve laugh, which also made Dean look again. His dark blue t-shirt was a little tight, but it fit – and Steve looked really, really good putting it on. Fuck. Or rather, not. Now, anyway. Later, definitely. He hoped. Dean shoved himself to his feet, glad the sweats he wore for sleeping were thick enough to keep him from embarrassing himself too much, and went into the bathroom. When he came back out, he ducked around Bruce to lean over and kiss Steve’s forehead. “He’s right, you don’t look like you’re on steroids – and I should have manned-up weeks ago and asked if you wanted to start keeping a change of clothes here at the diner.”

Startled blue eyes blinked up at him. “You…really?”

Dean smiled. “Yeah, really. I’m gonna go upstairs, kick on the air conditioner and go for my run. And then if Bruce says it’s okay, you can borrow a pair of my sweats and come upstairs for a while if you want. Turns out Luke and the boys have been taking bets on when we’d get together, and they know you’re here – Ricky stopped by last night and gave me shit, in fact, so if any of them drop in tonight you can help me give some of it back.”

“I can splint his leg,” Bruce agreed. “Between Cecil and I, the stairs won’t be a problem. And Clint was still asleep when we came down, so if he’s still tired he can take the bed once Steve is out of it.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Dean trotted up the stairs and got things going, went for his run and checked the wards, and when he got back Steve was already upstairs, sitting sideways in one of the booths with his splinted leg stretched out in front of him, drinking a glass of milk. Dean ruffled his hair on the way past, ducking back down into the basement to shower and change, and then came back up to get things started for the night. Clint joined him behind the counter shortly before opening, letting Dean show him the ropes just in case they needed to use the vacation-trainee excuse on anyone.

As it turned out, though, they didn’t. Because the Last Chance hadn’t even been open half an hour before a helicopter appeared in the sky, clearing the rocky walls of sandstone and bedrock that bordered the diner’s territory to the west and setting down just beyond the parking area. Steve immediately started pulling himself out of his seat, Clint helping him to get up and head out the door while Bruce ducked into the bathroom; Cecil held the door open for Clint and Steve, and gave the helicopter a friendly wave with his free hand. “Come on, come watch the show,” Clint told Dean. “Don’t want the bastard comin’ in here – it’s not a bad shit kind of place, and he’s about the baddest shit around.”

“He’s either here to threaten us or yell at us,” Steve said. “We did quit working for him, right? I remember we quit.”

“We did quit,” Clint confirmed. “And after this last stunt they pulled, we’re not takin’ missions from SHIELD anymore, either. So he’s just out here to be a dick.”

“Well, there’s nothing unusual about that, from some of the stories Bruce has told me.” Cecil winked at Dean. “Some of them get very…colorful when he’s telling them.”

Dean was still trying to sort out what the wink and the emphasis meant when a tall, dark-skinned man with an eyepatch got out of the helicopter and strode over to meet them, long leather coat flapping behind him. He stopped just short of the spot where the parking area started, right at the edge of the wards. “Okay, people, time to get back to work,” he ordered, scowling. He pointed a long finger at Dean. “And you’re coming too, we can use you.”

“Yeah, I’m sure, but you aren’t going to.” Clint was shaking his head. “What part of ‘we quit’ and ‘fuck you’ did you not get, Fury?”

“The world…”

“If the world needs us, we’ll pitch in to help,” Steve said quietly, but his next words wiped the dawning satisfaction right off the man’s face. “In our own way, and on our own terms. You and SHIELD can go fuck yourselves.”

“Language, Captain. You have an image…”

“Only when I’m in front of the cameras – and wearing my fucking mask,” Steve snapped back at him, which really did seem to take him by surprise. “I’m not your puppet, your plaything, or your god-damned dog, so quit trying to call me to heel.”

Dean patted his shoulder. “Easy, Steve.”

The man, Fury, made a face. “You been giving him advice, Winchester? One quitter to another?”

Everyone else present bristled…but not Dean. He just stood a little straighter, having had plenty of time to think this particular accusation through – not like he hadn’t heard it before, and from people whose opinions had, at the time, actually mattered to him. He didn’t know this guy at all. “If you fight until your whole world becomes war…you’ve fought too long, and then you’re just part of the problem.”

“Well said,” agreed Bruce, ambling up from behind them. He was smiling, and Fury suddenly looked worried. “I’m counting to five,” the scientist said conversationally, clapping Dean on the shoulder. “Can I borrow a pair of sweats, Dean?”

Dean shrugged. “Yeah, sure – I need to do some laundry tonight anyway. Why?”

“You’ll see.” Bruce walked past him, looking very small and harmless, like usual. He was barefoot, for some reason, and he was taking his shirt off and counting as he walked. “One. Two. Three. Four…oh, you’re going for drama, sweet. Okay, five.”

And then he turned into the biggest thing outside of a Hell-born demon that Dean had ever seen. It roared, and Fury turned and ran for the helicopter. The big green monster made a show of trundling after him, chasing and swatting at the helicopter as it took off, but as soon as it was gone the monster turned around and ambled back, grinning a very large, self-satisfied grin. It was wearing tight purple shorts, Bruce’s loose khakis having been shredded by the transformation. Cecil was clapping so it took a bow, which made Clint and Steve both crack up. Dean just shook his head. “My sweats aren’t going to fit you!” he called out.

The monster laughed. “HULK NOT NEED, PUNY MAN NEED,” it boomed, and then cleared its throat. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you’re not scared.”

Dean shrugged. He had, in fact, seen worse things, and most of those had been trying to kill him. None of them had succeeded. “I knew whatever it was you were able to do had to be pretty big – and this is definitely big. Who was that asshole in the helicopter you were being so careful not to slap right out of the sky?”

“That was Nick Fury, director of SHIELD – he’s the head spook over all the other spooks,” Steve explained. “He is a raging asshole, and the glow I just saw on him looked a hell of a lot like the one that other guy had, the one who was here before – Fury didn’t have that the last time I saw him.”

“Oh great, that’s all we need – and Thor’s back home right now, I’m sure that’s not a coincidence.” Clint made a face, shaking his head. “So we’ve got angels involved?”

“If one’s in him, then yeah.” Dean wasn’t happy about it either – he hadn’t wanted Steve to get dragged into his old life, but it looked like that might be where they were heading. “That would explain why he called me a quitter, and why he stopped right on the edge of the wards – I’ve got special ones up just to keep the angels out. In my experience they’re either manipulative, game-playing shits or authority-obsessed jackasses, but they don’t always understand human stuff all that well so we do have that advantage. Unless they’re working together, this Fury guy and the angel, which would be really bad.” He frowned. “Doesn’t he know about Cecil, though? Because he completely ignored him.”

“Nobody knows about me, except present company,” Cecil told him. “So far as the rest of the world is concerned, I’m just some bored power station caretaker with a creepy hobby.” He made a face. “But you do have a point. I’m involved with Bruce, a man in Fury’s position should have at least known what I looked like – hell, he should have expected Bruce to be here if I was, and if he wanted Bruce’s cooperation I would have seemed like the perfect tool to use to guarantee that. So why just drop in and yell? He had to know you’d all push back, angel or no angel.”

Steve swore. “Dammit, he has another plan. He was seeing who was where, maybe? And if we’re all here and Thor’s still offworld…”

“…That means Tony’s by himself at the mansion – or worse, by himself headed back here.” Clint shook his head. “Bruce, your phone wasn’t in those pants, right?”

Bruce swatted at him – lightly, but the contact still pushed him back a few steps. “I left it in the diner, on the counter. Yours…”

“Charging, still – I ran it all the way down gettin’ here. I’ll go call him on yours.” Clint handed Steve off to Dean, then ran back to the diner while Dean and Steve limped back at a slower pace and Bruce decided to chase Cecil around in the parking area after Cecil playfully swatted him on the ass.

There was a little-used bench in front of the diner, and Dean settled Steve on it and then sat down beside him, and together they watched Bruce and Cecil play. “I’d never have guessed,” Dean said, shaking his head. “Everyone kept saying he was no one to mess with, I just figured he must have…I don’t know, mad ninja skills or something.”

That made Steve laugh. “No, Clint’s the only one with those.” Bruce caught Cecil, who kissed the tip of his nose, and then Bruce collapsed in on himself until he was back in his original body. Cecil promptly hauled him over to the bench to sit next to Steve, who patted his shoulder. “Your choreography needs work.”

Bruce, still wearing just the form-fitting purple shorts, which had obligingly shrunk back down when he did, stretched out his legs and snickered. “Okay, I’ll dig up some recordings of your USO show to help with that. We can all watch them.” Cecil came back with his shirt and he held out his hand for it, only to have it snatched out of reach. “Cecil!”

“Don’t pick on little brother,” his lover scolded. “And did we forget how tight those pants are, or were you just making sure everyone knows you tuck to the left?”

“Hey, it’s not like the whole world hasn’t seen the full monty at least once,” Bruce countered, although he did color up just slightly. He took the shirt and shrugged into it, arranging it so he was a little more covered. “But now Dean knows why I said I needed to borrow a pair of sweats.”

“You guys can help me do laundry,” Dean told him. “We can just do everyone’s at the same time. Unless you and Cecil were going back tonight?”

Even as he said it, it felt like a bad idea; he was somewhat relieved when Cecil immediately shook his head. It was Clint who answered, though, coming out of the diner with a grim look on his face. “No, we’re all stayin’ – sorry Dean,” he apologized. “I know it’s a pain, we’ll make it up to you. But Jarvis said Tony’s on his way here…and SHIELD’s not there, and near as he can tell they’re not anywhere they could ambush him.”

“How…”

“Jarvis is Tony’s computer,” Bruce explained. “He’s an artificial intelligence, a really snarky British one. He has a lot of resources at his disposal, but he’s probably just tapping into Google Earth – unlike the rest of us, he can access the satellite feeds in real-time.”

“Which is how he knew Fury and his helicopter didn’t go all that far away.” Clint grimaced. “Bastard had another plan, all right, and we’re bound to be seein’ it real soon. He doesn’t dare wait until Tony gets here, or take the risk that Thor might come back.”

“Or that I’d have time to recharge.” Bruce’s eyes had gone round with horror. “I can’t change again yet, it’s too soon. It was…oh god, they played us. And I…”

“No, this is not your fault,” Cecil insisted quietly. He wrapped his arms around Bruce, touching their foreheads together. “And there are plenty of us here who can deal with things, it’s going to be okay.”

“Your job will be to stay inside the wards with Steve, Bruce,” Dean put in firmly. He was back in getting-shit-done mode now. “Because they won’t block an unpossessed human, no matter how much of a shitbag the person happens to be. And if it comes to that, the basement’s a bomb shelter; get down in there with him and lock the door behind you until I come let you out.” Movement caught his attention, and he rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me, that must be what passes for a cyborg assassin these days. Is he always that…strutty?”

“He’s Fury’s special little pet, he kind of wallows it.” Clint’s jaw had set. “Oh look, he brought her with him.”

‘Her’ was Natasha, the cartoon badass chick who Dean now knew had once been Clint’s partner before she’d been ‘given’ to her current one. She looked impossibly like the picture Steve had drawn of her, more so than he would have thought anyone could. ‘Bucky’ just looked like a greasy-haired asshole with a metal arm. Dean’s scar itched. Oh yeah, this guy deserved what he was about to get. First, though, he needed to make sure he wouldn’t be stepping on any toes. “Clint, you have first dibs on that? Because if you do, I’ll take my turn after you’re done.”

“He’s…glowing,” Steve warned softly. “Not as brightly as Fury was, but…he’s not alone in there, Clint.” Bucky was staring at him, he could feel it, but he kept his eyes fixed on Clint’s. “This could be our chance to break her away. Maybe I can distract him…”

“You can keep your ass on the bench for this game,” Clint warned, reaching around Bruce to squeeze a tense shoulder. “I mean it, I’ll break the other leg for you if you try to join in. Any glow on Nat?” Steve shook his head. “Okay good, then today’s the day. I’ll go out by myself first, talk to her, see what’s goin’ on…and then we’ll go from there. Be ready to jump in, Dean – I can’t give him the ass-kicking he deserves, but I can make him remember he ran into me today and give Nat time to get out of range. He’s not as good as Steve.”

“We’re the same…”

“Yours comes from the heart,” Clint pointed out gently. “His comes from crazy, so no, you two aren’t the same.” He patted Steve’s shoulder again, exchanged nods with Dean, and started walking out to where his former partner was standing beside the asshole assassin Fury had ‘assigned’ her to. Today was his chance to get her away from Barnes, to rescue her from Fury’s reindeer games the way he hadn’t been able to rescue Phil, and if the only way to accomplish that was getting the shit kicked out of him by a crazy supersoldier…so be it.

Chapter Text

Barnes had been watching the exchange in front of the diner with a certain amount of contempt. Weak, all of them. And Rogers was still injured, which meant the one person who would have been any sort of challenge for him was mostly out of the game. Perhaps he would fulfill his mission first, and then incapacitate the de-powered Banner. Fury had said Winchester had a weapon, and to be careful, but Barnes was not seeing a weapon now and the only one approaching was that circus performer who shot arrows at people. He smiled. He would send his woman to deal with the performer, and that would also serve to get him past the barrier he could sense but not see. Fury had given him something to use to breach it, a small silver medallion inscribed with symbols which needed only to be activated by the blood of someone who had passed through the barrier multiple times; he had hoped to find such a person beforehand, but the area was sparsely populated. He handed the medallion to Natasha. “Cover it in his blood and return it to me. I will use that to pass the barrier, and then we will teach these weak fools their proper place and return them to service.”

She frowned. “Fury said Winchester has a hidden weapon.” Barnes didn’t respond to that, although his irritation that she wasn’t following his order was plain. She tried again. “And what about Stark?”

“Stark is not here,” he snapped. “When he comes, he will be surprised and we will take his armor from him – I have power from the ангел, as does Fury. He is no match for us.” His lip curled, and he reached out to touch her cheek. “Such a pity you were not found worthy.”

Natasha stepped away from him, clutching the medallion in her hand. It felt like it was burning her palm, but she concealed her reaction. Things had been bad enough when Fury had first assigned her to work with Barnes, hoping giving him what he wanted would keep the unstable Winter Soldier somewhat controllable; but now with the power of the ангел in him, something she had never believed in, not even as a child…now things were ten times worse. Especially since the ангел had given Barnes the idea that he was a holy warrior and forbidden him from indulging in ‘impure acts’ – even if he was by himself – and the resulting frustration was making him that much more unstable.

At least he hadn’t tried to order her to kill Clint, or any of the others. In fact, they were under strict orders from Fury not to kill any of the Avengers…although she wasn’t sure Barnes would obey that order. He’d started talking about his ‘mission’ again, after the coming of the ангел, and she feared it was encouraging him in that direction. Natasha had tried to talk to Fury about that, but the ангел in him had said it was unimportant and Fury had sent her away. She hadn’t tried to talk to Fury again since – honestly she was afraid to, because in his case she could no longer be sure which one of them she was speaking with.

She strode through the barrier, only recognizing its presence because the medallion in her hand had twinged, meeting Clint on the other side. He stared into her eyes for a long moment, and then he just barely smiled. “We’ve got this,” he told her. “Wish it could have been sooner, Nat. What’d he give you?”

Relief washed over her. She could see it in her former partner’s eyes; they had a plan, and the expectation that they would win. The Avengers were not at the disadvantage Fury and Barnes and the ангел had been anticipating. She showed him the medallion. “It’s to get him through the barrier. It must be covered with blood – he told me to use yours.” She flicked her eyes toward the diner. “He has been talking about his ‘mission’ again.”

“Well, that sucks. Don’t worry about it, though. He’d have to go through Dean to get to Steve, which ain’t gonna happen – the kind of things Dean’s used to fighting would make Barnes piss his pants.” Clint shrugged. “Dean’s already planning to kick his ass, but he told me I could have first dibs since the asshole stole my partner.” That made her smile, and he took the medallion from her hand. “Steve said this is our chance to help you get away from all the crazy, so if you want to take off, do it now and I’ll cover you. To the diner with the others or out into the rocks to get out of the bastard’s line of sight, your call.”

Her answer was to hug him, and then she turned and ran, heading for the highway and the wide, rocky expanse of desert beyond it. Clint stepped out of the warded area, putting himself between Barnes and the path Natasha had taken when the other man swore in Russian and made to lunge in that direction. He held up the medallion, then shrugged, popping it into his mouth and swallowing. “There’s that taken care of,” he said “Well hi, Barnes, you’re lookin’ kind of crazy. Got some company in there or is that all you?”

Barnes snarled at him, eyes faintly glowing. “You can’t fight me.”

“Oh, I can,” Clint corrected, grinning and cracking his knuckles. “I’ve been takin’ lessons.”

That got a snort. “He’s soft, weak.”

Clint snorted back. “No, he’s just somethin’ you’ll never be – a man. So come on, little boy, let’s see what you can do besides forcin’ women into relationships with you. Is that part metal too, do you make them change the batteries? Or did your new friend put a stop to that once he got in you?” He snickered. “Huh, that’s actually kind of ironic, isn’t it? I could have sworn you had a problem with lettin’ another guy come inside you.”

Barnes turned a very unflattering shade of red and leaped at him. Clint dodged, ducking a wild blow from the other man’s metal arm and getting in a solid punch of his own. “Aw man, there’s nothin’ to be embarrassed about. Was he pretty? Did he make it good for you? Inquiring minds want to know!”

“I will send you to Hell!”

Clint stuck out his tongue, dodging again. “If I had a nickel for every time someone’s told me that…”

Back at the front of the diner, Dean, Bruce and Cecil were keeping Steve from trying to join the fight. “Dammit, I might be able to get through to him!” he insisted. “I’m the only person who’s ever fought him who he hasn’t killed!”

Bruce grabbed his chin, forcing Steve to look him in the eye. “Liar,” he rebutted quietly, and Steve paled, a shudder running through his body. “The fact that you still have a broken leg aside…Steve, once and for all, you cannot save him. The man you grew up with is gone, he died right before you did. That person over there is a very bad, mostly insane man who just happens to be wearing your friend’s face.”

“But he’ll kill Clint! He’s as strong as I am, and almost as fast…and now he has help over and above that.”

“He has a point about that last one.” Cecil was scowling now, his eyes fixed on something behind the fight. “Maybe I can do something about that. Bruce, you stay here with Steve; you can’t fight an angel.”

“You can?” Dean wanted to know.

“I’ve never tried it – never been near one until now – but I’m pretty sure I can at least cut him off from the rabid lunatic there and give Clint a fighting chance.” Cecil turned just enough to smile at Dean, pushing back his bangs; all three of his eyes were glowing purple. He leaned over and gave Bruce a peck on the cheek, ruffled Steve’s hair, then turned and walked across the parking area.

And as he walked, something…erupted out of his back, translucent and writhing, glowing the same color as his eyes. Dean and Steve both stared openmouthed at Bruce…who blushed. “Yeah, I was waiting for the best time to try to explain…that part of things. Carlos had been working on the serum too, he was trying to save Cecil – heart condition, he was dying. SHIELD had started moving to get all the research and either co-opt or get rid of everyone who’d been doing it…and they had their flunky Carlsburg contaminate Carlos’s version of the serum with some unidentifiable biologic material they’d found.” He waved a hand. “Basically, he’s now half whatever that was. I have my suspicions that it might have been an angel or a demon, not sure which.”

Steve and Dean looked at each other. “That does explain why ‘Steve Carlsburg’ is a swear-word on the show,” Dean said.

“Yeah, that makes perfect sense now,” Steve agreed. “So Cecil…”

“Assuming we all survive this and the Army doesn’t show up? He and I are going to be coming around here to get dinner and tease you two for a long, long time.”

Cecil came out of the warded barrier some little distance behind the fight, one glowing purple tentacle whipping out toward Barnes. The tentacle went through his neck…and hooked something, yanking it out and tossing it away.

‘It’ turned out to be an angel, which hit the ground in an ungainly tangle of limbs and wings; its former vessel lost his balance momentarily and took a knee, but then Clint kicked a rock at him and he shook his head and dove back into the fight, cursing in Russian. The angel climbed back to its feet, spitting mad. “You can’t do that, you…you abomination!”

Cecil snorted, rolling his eyes. “Considering what I just pulled you out of, Junior, I don’t think I’m the one with the problem.” Another tentacle shot out, grabbing the angel by the throat and shaking it; the sword it had been trying to draw fell out of its hand. “No, I don’t think so.” He tossed the angel away again, a tentacle swatting it on the behind as it stumbled. This time it spun around and raised its fists. “You want to fight like this, really? I thought you only fought when you were crouched inside a real person – you know, so they could take all the hits for you.”

The angel threw a punch, and a tentacle grabbed its arm and used its momentum against it so that it nearly fell again. “I can do this all day, Junior.”

The angel snarled at him. “I am not alone.”

Cecil snorted again. “Yeah, I know – but he sent you out here alone, didn’t he? And now he’s using you to see what I can do.” He pointed off toward the broken rocky wall, with his finger this time. “Come out, you coward!” he ordered in full radio voice. “And put yourself back in your pants first, because we all know you’re getting off on this.”

And Nick Fury stepped out of the rocks, eyes glowing. If Dean and Bruce hadn’t stopped him, Steve would have been on his feet. “It’s the same one as before! Dean, it’s that same angel who came for you!”

“Well, fuck.” Dean sighed, patting his shoulder and standing up. “Okay, I guess it’s my turn. You two stay here, okay? Because, to copy Cecil: Neither one of you can fight an angel.”

“You can?” Steve wanted to know.

And Dean grinned at him. “Actually, yeah.” On a whim, leaned back over and kissed Steve – hard. “Stay. Here,” he ordered quietly. “I’ll be back.” He started to move away, but Steve grabbed him and dragged him back in for an even more intense kiss. Dean pulled himself out of it reluctantly. “Hold that thought.”

And then he went striding across the parking area, drawing the Scythe as he went. He stalked right through the wards, right up to Barnes, who had just put Clint down for the count with a lucky uppercut from his metal arm, and blocked both the punch and the kick that were aimed at him with minimal effort. And the next punch, and the next, and then he sidestepped a kick and knocked the assassin sprawling into the dirt. “That’s it?” he asked. “Crap, and I was looking forward to kicking your ass. Waste of my time.” Barnes lunged back to his feet and tried to rush him, Dean shoved him off…and swung the Scythe. And the blood-streaked red-starred metal arm dropped into the dirt, twitching.

Barnes howled in rage. He might have continued the fight – he looked like he wanted to, anyway, arm or no arm – but Dean was almost immediately in his face, with the Scythe right under his chin, smiling at him. “All righty then,” he said. “I do not want to deal with your worthless punk-ass anymore, got better things to do, but I’m not gonna kill you in front of him – I won’t kill you unless you come back, got it? So you run, Bucky-boy. Run really fast, and really far away, and then wherever you end up you stay there and spray-paint the words ‘Dean Can Kick My Ass’ on the walls or somethin’ so you don’t forget. Because I can, I will, and I won’t even break a sweat doin’ it.” Dean stepped back, holding the Scythe out of the way. “Now fucking run, before I change my mind.”

Barnes hesitated…and then the angel Cecil had been holding off went for Dean and he decapitated it with a backhand swing of the Scythe, barely even looking. The angel’s body contracted into nothingness with a horrible screeching sound, vanishing, and Barnes took to his heels and ran like his life depended on it. Dean smirked and high-fived Cecil. “Just the one more?”

“Near as I can tell.” Fury was stalking towards them, scowling. “Oh look, somebody’s pissed off. Shall we separate them, see which one of them it is?”

“Probably both,” Dean told him. He was scowling himself, though. “What I really want to know is where the hell his usual ride is at.”

Cecil shrugged. “We can ask him.” A tentacle flicked out, grabbed hold and pulled…and nothing happened. He frowned and a second tentacle joined the first, then a third.

Fury smirked and raised a glowing hand. “Cecil, let go!” Dean ordered, pulling him back with one hand and holding up the Scythe with the other. “He was gonna hurt you. And you can’t pull him out if he was invited in, so that answers one of my questions.” He gave the older man a little push. “Go check on Clint, I’ve got this one.”

‘Fury’ smirked. “Really?”

“Really.” Dean scowled into the dark eyes, looking at the angel behind them. “Did you kill your host? Did you?!”

“I didn’t kill him,” the new host’s mouth said. Smugly, even, and Dean honestly wasn’t sure which one of them the attitude was coming from – probably both. “I had been using him for too long, he was aware of me. He could not accept the…necessity of my actions. When I left him, he renounced his faith and killed himself.”

“Oh, so you jumped out of him and left him with the memories of everything you’d done, knowing he wouldn’t be able to handle it.” Another smug look and a shrug, but this time Dean smiled. “You know, there’s someone I need to share this with. SAMMY!”

Sam Winchester stepped out of nothing, wearing a very nice suit and perfectly polished shoes. His longish hair was neatly combed, and his eyes were pitch black and filled with flickering flames. He raised an eyebrow at his brother. “You bellowed?”

Dean grinned at him; Crowley had told him what his brother’s job in Hell was. “Guess who just admitted to driving his host to suicide?”

“Ooh, a confession. I love those.” Sam’s hand flashed out, much the way Cecil’s tentacles had earlier, but unlike Cecil Sam snatched the angel out of Fury’s body with ease. Almost immediately the glow that had been on the angel crumbled off like a layer of ash, and its wings burned away; it howled, and he gave it a shake. “Shut up, you knew better. Jimmy’s fine,” he told Dean. “I put him to work in rehab, he wanted to help people.” Fury had staggered back a few steps, looking like he was trying to decide what to do next and whether it should be violent, and Sam rolled his eyes. “Just go,” he said, flapping his free hand in the general direction of the rest of the desert. “Run, walk, stride menacingly, whatever – as long as you go away. Oh, and the taint from letting the idiot here possess you means wards can block you now, even though you won’t be able to pick up another angelic ride-along, so you might want to keep that in mind going forward. ”

Fury drew himself up with a scowl. “I don’t know who you think you are…” Sam obligingly handed him a business card. With a smile. Fury looked at it, grimaced, and put it in his pocket…where it abruptly caught on fire, making him yelp and slap at the fabric to put it out. He glared – the two brothers were laughing at him now – then turned and stomped off in the same general direction Barnes had run in.

Sam looked over at the diner, caught Steve’s eye and waved; he smiled when he received a tentative wave in return. “I’m your idiot boyfriend’s brother!” he called over. “Everything’s okay, just taking out the trash!” He turned back to Dean, grinning. “Mind if I pop in for pie sometime? Crowley’s been gloating.”

In answer, Dean put up the Scythe and gave him a hug. “You can come visit any time you want, you idiot – you’re still my baby brother, even if you are hot stuff in Hell right now.”

Sam hugged him back, then slapped him on the arm, right over the spot where Castiel’s handprint had been burned into his skin; Dean yelped, and his brother winked. “Present for Steve – now he can ink up the other side. I’ll see you guys later.”

He took a step back and disappeared, taking the now-fallen angel with him. Dean looked around and spotted Clint walking back toward the diner with Cecil in his arms, and he went running that way, meeting Bruce coming from the opposite direction. “What…”

“Apparently Cecil can do more stuff than even he knew about,” Clint told him, carefully transferring the unconscious man to Bruce, who was pale and looked shaken but had a faint green ring showing around his pupils and had held out his arms rather insistently. “All I know is that I was out and then purple lightning hit me and all of a sudden everything was fine except him.”

“I’ve got him, go find Natasha,” Bruce said, and Clint nodded and pelted off. “He overextended himself,” Bruce explained to Dean, who fell into step with him as they walked back to the diner where Steve was waiting. “He needs sugar and carbs, he’ll be happy and sleepy for the rest of the night and probably start going on about having a farm, because he apparently does that for some reason.” He sucked in a breath. “He was checking Clint over, then all of a sudden he held up his hand and looked it at – it was glowing – and then he put his hand in the center of Clint’s chest, light flared, Cecil keeled over and Clint sat straight up. Really, it did look like lightning had hit him. I was panicking, but then a hand grabbed my arm and a voice told me…what I just told you, and that Cecil would be okay and that…that he was happy for us.”

Dean’s eyes widened. “He…?”

Bruce nodded, blinking away tears; the tip of a nearly invisible tentacle twitched up to brush one off his cheek. “Carlos.”

Chapter Text

The Winter Soldier was running through the desert with no clear destination in mind. Dangling bits of wire and machinery twitched and writhed just below his shoulder, trying to make the missing metal arm move, and he stumbled now and then as his body tried and failed to adjust to being off-balance. His eyes were wild. His woman had abandoned him, his arm was gone, and the ангел which had chosen him had been ripped from him and then killed. Who were these men, that they could do such things? And why had Fury not warned him? He had a mission to complete, the ангел had told him it was a holy mission of which even the Most High would approve. The one within Fury had even agreed, it had said Steve Rogers must die for leading a warrior of the light astray. So why had Fury and the ангел not come to help him, their chosen warrior? It did not make sense!

Someone called for him to stop – called him by name, no less – and he froze. The voice was familiar, stirring memories which sometimes haunted his dreams. Memories of war and fear, of resentment and anger and jealousy…of secretly hating the man who loved him, the formerly weak friend who had become so much more than he could ever be. He scowled, used his training to push the memories back. He was more now, much more. And there had been no voice, there couldn’t have been. The owner of that voice was long dead.

He jumped when the owner of the voice obligingly appeared in front of him as though just to prove him wrong. Dugan. The other Commandos appeared as well, smiling in a very unpleasant way and forming a line Barnes could not prevent himself from backing away from. Dugan cracked his knuckles. "Robin Hood was right," he said. "You've never been a man."

The man who had once been known as Sergeant Barnes, lifelong friend to Steve Rogers and a member of the Howling Commandos, shook his head violently. “You are dead!”

“Yeah, and? We’ve all been dead, you included.”

“And the Captain was dead longer than all of us,” Farnsworth put in. “But he’s definitely handled it better than you.”

“Which is why we’re here.” Dugan smiled. “Bucky-boy, crazy or not, you have a debt to pay – and we’re here to collect it.”

Barnes took another step back, tried to run…and they reappeared in front of him before he’d gotten more than a few yards. “Going somewhere?”

“Of course he is,” Jones said. “Isn’t it cute he thinks he can run from us?”

“Hey, running’s what cowards do,” Morita replied. “Go ahead, Barnes, try it again.”

Barnes tried going back in his original direction; the ghosts appeared in his path, laughing at him. “You are such an idiot,” Dugan told him. “I can’t believe you just did that. Want to try it some more? We’ve got all the time in the world. You, however…”

And that was when an even more familiar voice – a living voice this time – barked out behind him, “Where the hell do you think you’re going, Soldier?!”

Barnes spun halfway around, fear warring with betrayal. “You did not tell me they could do that!” he screamed. “You said we were invincible, with the ангел on our side! But instead you abandoned me, your chosen holy warrior, and you have set the умершие on us – we cannot fight призраки нашего прошлого!”

The ghosts laughed at that. He turned back around to look at them, obviously getting ready to run again…and Fury pulled out his sidearm and shot him in the back of the head, then turned and walked away. He did not see the ghosts converge on the body, dragging out the twenty-something soldier Bucky Barnes had once been and pulling him away into nothingness kicking and screaming.

Natasha didn’t see it either, although she was equally close. She had been hiding behind some rocks, trying to decide what to do, which direction to go…when suddenly a familiar voice in her ear had warned her not to make a sound, and a familiar, trusted hand on her arm – even though there was nobody there – had let her know it wasn’t safe to move. That was when she’d heard Barnes, and then Fury…and then the single gunshot. She waited. The hand finally squeezed to let her know the coast was clear, and the voice asked her if she wanted to wait for Clint to come get her and take her back to the other Avengers or go to one of the more hidden safe houses and disappear from there to a life of her own choosing. Natasha considered it, then chose the safe house. The voice agreed with her decision and said he’d explain it to Clint, then told her which safe house to use and the best way to get there and what to do once she did. The invisible hand became a half-hug and the faint scent of a painfully familiar aftershave, and then vanished. And Natasha got up, turned in the direction she’d been told to go in, and started walking. One did not disobey the words of the умершие, not unless you wanted to join them.

Chapter Text

Nick Fury, stomping his way back to his waiting helicopter in the growing darkness, was pissed. He’d lost his connection to the angel, completely lost control of the Avengers, and been forced to liquidate his most effective, ruthless assassin because the guy had finally snapped. The dead, really? Ghosts from the past? Of course, Romanov had run too, and quicker, but he wasn’t as worried about losing her because he knew that loss was most likely temporary – she’d wanted out of the rabbit hole of insanity that was working with Barnes, an out Fury had repeatedly refused to give her, so she’d taken this opportunity to get away from them both. He’d either track her down later and bring her back into the fold, or she’d show up at Stark’s superhero frat house in Malibu and rejoin the Avengers. If they’d have her, that was. If not – and he didn’t expect them to, no matter what Barton thought about it – Fury would get her back anyway, because it wasn’t like there was anywhere else for her to go.

Lost in his thoughts, positive he was alone, he actually jumped when he heard someone clear their throat. There was a man standing there, leaning against a tall outcropping of rocks, watching him. He had on a light-colored coat, and it didn’t look like he was very tall, but every other detail about him was obscured by the shadows. “Nice shot,” the man said. “The duck game at the carnival frustrates you, doesn’t it? Targets just shouldn’t move.”

Fury’s gun reappeared in his hand. “You’re not moving.”

The man snorted. “I don’t feel the need. Yet.” He cocked his head. “I knew someone who worked for you once, guy named Carlsberg. You remember him?”

Fury had to think about it. A lot of people worked for him, or had worked for him in the past. A vague image came to mind of an average-sized man with light hair, some kind of researcher. “I might. Why?”

“Oh, I used to work with him.” The man unfolded from his lean and moved partially out of the shadows, surprisingly towards the gun, the sun’s dying light illuminating more identifying details. Some variety of Latino, too dark to be Hispanic. The light-colored coat was a white lab coat, and underneath it the man was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt and tennis shoes. He was quite a bit shorter than Fury, had longish dark hair, silvering at the temples, and his eyes behind his black-framed glasses were dark and intense. “See, I remember Carlsberg really well – and you, by extension, because you’re the one who gave him the job of getting a certain research project for you. Serum research, ring a bell?”

Oh, now Fury remembered. He made a face. “That Carlsberg. He was a researcher, died in a stupid accident in his own lab. He took the research with him, we don’t have it.”

And the man smiled. He was almost startlingly good-looking. He shook his head. “Oh no, I know you don’t have it, Fury. I know that because it was my research he was after, and he didn’t just die – I killed him.” His smile widened when Fury’s eyes did. “See, you probably don’t remember my name, but I know you remember who I was now, right? I was the guy doing the serum research you sent Carlsberg after. I was the guy whose work he tried to sabotage on your orders, using something he got from your labs, something you hadn’t been able to identify. And then I was the guy he tried to blackmail, demanding all my research and my test subject.” He chuckled, and the hair stood up on the back of Fury’s neck. “You see, Carlsberg wasn’t all that smart. He figured I’d tested on an animal, with the sabotaged serum. He was in lust after my husband, but he didn’t know my husband was dying, or that I’d been developing the serum to try to save him because I loved him way too much to lose him to something as stupid as a weak heart.”

Fury’s hand tightened around the gun. “You…you’re dead.”

“I killed Carlsberg,” the man said. “He contaminated the serum, with biologic material you couldn’t identify, and I gave that to my terminally ill husband.” The smile became a snarl, and he took another step forward; Fury stepped back without even realizing he’d done it. “For three days, he was unconscious but still in agony. He woke up as a half-breed – half man, half something else. Three eyes. Etheric tentacles. He’s telepathic, and empathic, and he’s going to live probably forever, and I knew that if you ever found out he’d be living that forever as a specimen in some underground government lab, or being used as a tool, a slave, by you and whoever came after you ad infinitum because of what he could do.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t going to let that happen. I was still deciding what would be best when Carlsberg started up Phase 2, blackmail. He demanded my research and my subject, and he was in a hurry because you were pressuring him so he didn’t give me any time. I knew what I had to do then. I triggered the accident in his lab myself. I texted Cecil – it wasn’t coded, he could ‘hear’ everything I was thinking, the text was just a ruse to explain why he’d already be in shock when the authorities showed up at the house to tell him I was dead. I went into Carlsberg’s lab, and I yelled at him for being careless and killing us both so the recorder would pick it up and the cameras would see it…and then I got close and grabbed the collar of his shirt, and I told him exactly what – or rather, who – he’d demanded that I hand over, and I told him I was going to spend the rest of eternity torturing him for making me leave my husband – who was now immortal because of him – alone forever.”

The red-gold light was shining through him, but Fury fired anyway; the bullet ricocheted off into the shadows, leaving a white scar on the rocks. And the spirit who had once been a scientist named Carlos smiled again. “I did my time for the five innocents who died in the explosion, and I took my punishment,” he said. “Carlsberg got his own punishment, and he’s still getting it. But you were the one who gave the orders. And you were the one who offered him my Cecil as his ‘bonus’ if he managed to get everything you wanted from me. So now it’s time for your punishment.”

Fury straightened. So this was what Barnes had been babbling about – he’d just thought the man had finally snapped. What a waste. “Ghosts can’t hurt the living.”

“You’d be surprised what a smart ghost can do,” Carlos countered. “Or two of them. Hey Phil!”

Another ghost faded into view beside him, this one Caucasian with thinning light brown hair, wearing a dark suit and tie. He smiled and gave a little wave. “Hi Director Fury. I thoroughly briefed Dr. Velasquez before we showed up, he knows all the best ways to get to you now.” His smile widened. “I’m here to avenge what you did to Clint and Natasha. And Steve.”

“Cecil,” Carlos said. “And Bruce.”

There was a shimmer, and then a stocky, muscular man with longish gray-streaked dark hair and dark eyes was standing there. “Sorry I’m late, boot camp…took longer than I expected it would,” he said. He raised an eyebrow at Fury. “Dean, because you were working with the bastard who tried to drag him back in. And hell, Steve too, since he’s practically my son-in-law.”

“You can run,” Phil told Fury conversationally. “Of course, you’ll always know you ran, so that will be in the back of your mind – it will bother you.”

“We’ll be around,” Carlos assured him. “We don’t have to chase you, we’ll just…show up.”

“Kiss getting a good night’s sleep goodbye, though,” came from John. “We’re dead, we don’t need sleep. Even when you can’t see us, you’ll know we’re there.” He grinned. “Or you’ll wonder if we are.”

Fury tried to stand his ground. “There are others, they’ll be able to see you…”

“Well, they’ll be able to see something,” John told him…and then he was wearing brighter colors, formfitting, and a black eyemask. He grinned around the cigar that was now clenched in his teeth. “Howdy.”

“It wouldn’t do for anyone to see us as ourselves – it might even hurt some people,” Phil said, and then his suit became a battered trenchcoat, and his blandly handsome features were covered by an equally battered fedora and a black-blotched white facemask. The blotches writhed, moving apparently at random. “I always wanted to be Rorschach. Clint was the only person who knew that.”

Carlos sighed, then became blue, glowing…and very, very naked. Very naked. Fury stared, John snickered, and the ink blotches on his mask gave the impression that Phil was rolling his eyes. “Really, Carlos?”

Carlos shrugged. “It’s traditional. And besides, Cecil had me dress up for Halloween as Dr. Manhattan once. We didn’t make it out of the house – not that I would have gone out of the house wearing nothing but glow-in-the-dark edible body paint anyway – and I didn’t make it back to work until November third. It’s a good memory.” He chuckled. “Good thing Bruce has a lot of stamina, he’s going to need it.”

“Yeah, what exactly are you gonna do about that once the world ends and you can be together again?” John wanted to know, gesturing expansively with his cigar.

“We’ll share.”

“Cecil?”

Carlos snorted. “No, Bruce. He was one of my best friends in college – and have you seen him? He’s adorable.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” John told him, replacing the cigar. “So, Fury, gonna run now? You probably should, before we do something to make you show up at your helicopter with wet pants.”

Fury considered that, weighing his options…which brought him to the realization that he didn’t have any. Yet, anyway. He scowled and started walking again, heading for the well-hidden helicopter. He made to walk right through the ghosts, who disappeared before he touched them…but he knew they were still there, because he could feel it.

Or could he?

Chapter Text

Dean ran ahead to the diner so he could get the door for Bruce, making a detour because Steve was standing up next to the bench with a very intense look on his face. Dean pushed the other man against the wall, bracing him there, and asked huskily, “Did you hold it?”

“The whole time,” Steve confirmed, and then the two of them sort of met in the middle for a kiss that had all the passion of waning battle-heat in it…and something else, something more. Dean pulled back, looking into Steve’s eyes. “You know,” he observed, only slightly out of breath. “I’m…more than okay with this being a forever kind of thing.”

Steve’s answer was to reel him back in. Which didn’t last as long as either of them would have liked, because something poked Dean and made him jump. The something turned out to be a tentacle, so translucent it was nearly invisible, and Bruce was smirking. “Cecil says stop that, you have an audience – and it isn’t us.”

Which was when something else touched Dean, a very familiar hand that grasped his arm, then went around his shoulders. “You’ve made me so proud, son,” his father’s gruff voice said. “You’re a better man than I ever was, and a smarter one, too. And for what it’s worth, even though you don’t need it…the two of you have my blessing.”

Dean saw Steve’s eyes widen…and then the elder Winchester’s presence was gone again. “He…I felt him, he hugged me.”

Dean blinked hard, swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, but he was smiling. “Welcome to the family. I’d been hoping I could keep you out of our weirdness…”

Steve grinned, shaking his head. “I’d been trying to keep you out of ours. I think it’s all the same weirdness now, though.”

“Yeah, looks like.” Dean took another quick kiss, then let Steve lean on him and started helping him to the door. He stopped again, though, when a roaring noise from the sky like a jet engine started getting closer. “The hell…?!”

“It’s just Tony.” Steve waved with his free arm, and the approaching red-and-gold blur slowed, became visible as the ‘robot’ Dean had seen on the tabloid cover that one time, and then used its jets to land gently on its feet right in front of them.

The visor of the helmet flipped back, revealing Tony’s astonished face. “Dammit, am I too late?”

“Kind of,” Dean told him. He gestured to the suit. “Built this one yourself too?”

Tony grinned. “Damn straight. So I missed it?”

“Yeah, sorry.” Dean shrugged. “There wouldn’t really have been much you could have done except stand over here and keep Steve and Bruce company, though.”

“Fury was possessed by an angel,” Steve explained when Tony didn’t look like he wanted to believe that. “And so was…so was Bucky. Cecil yanked out Bucky’s and beat the crap out of it, Dean killed it when it tried to attack him, and then he had to call his brother to get the one out of Fury.” He gave Dean a questioning look. “What happened to its other body, the one from before?”

“Dead – he drove the poor guy to suicide. Sammy said the guy’s fine, though; he put him to work helping people. Which was what he always wanted to do, it’s why he let Castiel use him in the first place.”

Steve’s blue eyes hardened. “Now I’m doubly glad your brother burned the bastard’s wings off.”

Tony’s mouth opened and closed a few times, but nothing came out. He looked to Bruce, most likely for a more scientific explanation…and that was when he saw the tentacles. His eyes went wide. “Bruce…”

“I told you Cecil was special.”

“You didn’t tell me he was a special tentacle monster.”

“No, because I didn’t want to share.”

Tony choked, and Dean couldn’t help but grin. He held open the diner’s door so Bruce could take Cecil inside, then raised an eyebrow at Tony. “Are you comfortable in that, or do you need to get out of it? Because Bruce has dibs on my last pair of clean sweats.”

“Unlike the rest of the exhibitionists I work with, I wear regular clothes under my uniform to prevent those kind of situations from coming up,” the older man protested. He did something, and the suit folded itself off of him and then packed itself neatly into a shape reminiscent of a large suitcase, leaving him in worn sweats and a grease-stained t-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes. He carried the suit-case into the diner and set it down out of the way, then moved to help Bruce while Dean settled Steve back into his seat in the booth. “Where’s Clint?”

“Went to find Natasha. He told her to run and he’d cover her, so she did.”

Tony jumped when a tentacle tickled his ear. “I’m not into that kind of anime, stop it,” he warned, throwing a halfhearted glare at Bruce, who was snickering. “Should one of us go…”

Steve shook his head. “No.” He took a deep breath. “We’ve had…ghosts showing up, Tony. Cecil’s husband, Dean’s father. If there’s one waiting out there to talk to Clint…well, I think we know who it’s going to be.”

“Shit.” Tony dropped onto one of the stools at the counter, out of reach of the teasing tentacles. “Yeah, he’s not going to want an audience for that.”

Chapter Text

Clint was in hunting mode, sticking to the desert’s sparse but lengthening shadows, practically a shadow himself. He didn’t want to run up on Barnes or Fury unexpectedly and get killed, but knew he had to find Natasha to make sure one of them hadn’t found her first. He wasn’t sure if she wanted him to find her or not, but he had promised he’d cover her escape, after all, and this was part of her escape.

He heard a gunshot and moved in that direction, and then he heard a second one and started moving faster. He eventually spotted Fury stalking off talking and muttering to himself, but closer inspection showed that the second shot had been aimed the rocks. Maybe having the angel yanked out had driven him nuts? Clint backtracked Fury and found Barnes’ body, and he found the place where his former partner had been hiding nearby…and then an invisible hand catching his arm when he started to follow her trail almost sent him right out of his skin. “No, Clint, you can’t follow her,” Phil’s voice told him. The hand loosened its grip but didn’t let go. “I told her I’d explain it to you.”

“Okay.” Clint blinked, and blinked again. He couldn’t see anyone or anything, but the presence of the man who had been his handler – not to mention his lover of nearly three years – was painfully familiar. “I heard…what happened. I kept tellin’ myself it wasn’t really you…”

“It was, that’s why it happened.” Phil sighed. “They took everything away when they brought me back, I didn’t remember anything about…about us, or a lot of other things. But then one day something shocked me when my team was investigating an abandoned base, not even a really big jolt, but apparently that was enough. The memories came flooding back and I knew what they’d done…and I knew coming back wasn’t an option, because I was the only viable test case they had and they still hadn’t been able to figure out why it had worked on me but not on anyone else. So I grabbed a vial of something and went back out with it clenched in my fist, told everyone to clear the area except for one guy who I told to get the helicopter, we had to dump what I’d found before it killed everyone and I only knew of one place that would work.”

Clint raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You…”

“Picked the most unlikeable bastard present,” Phil told him. “I had him fly us to the nearest active volcano…and then I shot him in the head and let us drop. They’ll never do it again, they can’t. I took it all with me.”

“And then...”

“I went to Hell and took my punishment,” Phil said. “I murdered a man in cold blood, that’s the way it works. Cecil’s husband Carlos killed five innocent people when he took out his blackmailer, and John Winchester crossed the line a lot in pursuit of vengeance against the demon that killed his wife. We did our time, though, and they said we could work off the rest of our debt if we wanted to help put an end to this bullshit that’s been interfering with everyone – the same bullshit that interfered with us and the people we loved.” The smirk was audible in his voice. “Of course I said yes.”

Clint smiled. It was teary, but it was still a smile. “Go kick ass, Phil,” he said. “I’ll see you…when I see you.” He sniffed. “Nat?”

“I found her here and asked if she wanted me to send you out to get her or if she wanted to go somewhere safe and start over. I think she made the right choice, it’s about time she tried having a normal life.”

“Yeah, it is.” Clint sniffed again. “I’m glad you stopped them, Phil.”

“I knew you’d understand.” The lover’s touch Clint hadn’t felt since a month before Loki had come and everything had gone to hell caressed his cheek. “We both have work to do, but…I’ll see you when I see you, Clint.”

And then the familiar presence was gone, and Clint was alone again. “I doubt they’ll let you see me once I get to Hell, since you’re already out,” Clint told the empty air. “But it’s a nice thought, anyway.”

Chapter Text

In a work camp area of Hell, one of the overseer demons heard a familiar sound and stepped out of the way as a handful of buzzing insects streaked past and descended on one of the prisoners he’d been…encouraging to dig faster. The man screamed as he was stung repeatedly, falling down into the ditch he and the others were pointlessly enlarging. The rest of the prisoners kept digging, most of them not even looking up; it happened to all of them on a regular basis, horseflies or bees or mosquitoes – or in one really sorry bastard’s case, clouds of gnats. The guy beside the shrieking man, however, did a double take and then stepped away from him, scowling. “What the fuck, those are yellowjackets!”

The other prisoners stopped digging, blistered hands clenching around the splintering handles of their rusty shovels. Slowly, they shuffled across the hard-packed ground, chains rattling, to circle the man writhing and screaming in the ditch, staring at the distinctive yellow-striped insects attacking him. They waited until the yellowjackets finished and flew away again, then two of them put down their shovels and grabbed the chains, yanking the man out of the ditch by his ankles. Their nominal leader, a grizzled veteran of the chain gang, leaned over him menacingly. “Fucking yellowjackets, Barney? Ain’t no one on this chain ever had fucking yellowjackets come after them, you scum-sucking piece of shit!” He glanced up at the demon, which hadn’t moved. “Ten minute break?”

The demon nodded. “Make it twenty and I’ll give you water – thirty and I’ll even let you drink it.” It pointed. “Some cactus came up over there the other day, nice little spiky ones.”

“Thanks.” The men as one started to walk, dragging Barney by his chains. The demon smiled when the man’s yells became screams, and grinned broadly when the screams began to be interspersed with meaty thuds. He knew they’d start in with the shovels once they were done using their fists, and then they’d drag the slowly healing mess back and make him watch while they drank their water. Bad behavior was rewarded at this level of Hell, because these guys needed to learn to resist the carrot if they wanted to get away from the stick; every time they didn’t, it extended their time on the chain. He shook his shaggy horned head. Bad enough to corrupt a kid that was under your protection – all of the guys on this particular chain were down for that – but to convince that kid he was damned to Hell because of what you’d made him do? Barney was one sick fuck.

A buzzing noise sounded, and another swarm of yellowjackets dove down, circled the ditch, and then arrowed off toward the cactus patch. The demon chuckled at the renewed screams. Aw, Barney’s brother must be depressed, dwelling on being destined for Hell, rolling the idea over and over in his head. The guy usually didn’t do that, meaning the worst Barney normally got was a handful of mosquitoes off of some random thought, so this was gonna be a learning experience for the unrepentant bastard – each sting made him feel exactly what his brother was feeling, after all.

Chapter Text

By the time twilight was rolling across the desert in earnest, things had settled back down at the Last Chance. Jarvis had informed Tony – who passed it on to the rest of them – that Fury had gone back to his headquarters. Natasha was on her way to start a well-deserved new life, a decision none of her former teammates held against her. The Winter Soldier was no longer a threat, having been killed by Fury. And the angels would most likely be leaving everyone alone for a while, because this particular power play hadn’t ended very well for them.

Inside the diner, Bruce was sitting in a booth holding a still mostly out-of-it Cecil propped up against his shoulder, feeding him a milkshake through a straw. A hollow-eyed Clint was on the other side of the booth watching condensation trickle down the sides of his glass of soda and playing with the water ring it was leaving on the table. He had flicked some of it onto Cecil at one point, and a nearly invisible purple tentacle had flicked out and smacked his hand, making him smile. Steve was still sitting in his original place by the door, splinted leg stretched out in front of him, and if another pale tentacle was snaking out from time to time and stroking his hair or patting his shoulder, nobody was feeling the need to comment on it. Not even Tony, who was sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee, relaying messages from Jarvis and watching Steve watch Dean, who had just gotten off the phone with the state highway patrol after telling them someone needed to come pick up a body out in the desert and that yes, the person who’d found it would waiting there at the diner so they could get a statement.

Cecil murmured something, and Bruce shushed him and said no. “Pigs this time,” he reported at the questioning looks. “You can’t mail-order livestock, right?”

Everyone looked at each other, and Tony pulled out his phone with a huff. “Like anyone here would know that. I will just Google…okay yes, you can. And that’s just scary. You can even…yes, you can even order a cow. Or multiple cows. You can order your very own herd of cows from anywhere with an internet connection, and…yes, and they do take PayPal.”

Clint snorted. “Do they take Bitcoins?”

“Do not utter that financial blasphemy in my presence,” Tony shot back, shaking the phone at him. “Minecraft has ruined an entire generation, they all think there are actual naturally-occurring resources on the Internet now.”

“You built an exact replica of the Tower in there, Tony.”

“Jarvis did that.”

Clint raised an eyebrow. “Jarvis built a bunny pit in one of the sub-basements, really?”

Tony sulked. “That was an accident, how was I supposed to know they could breed like that?” Then he saw red and blue lights and straightened up. “Well that was fast.”

“It’s Luke, he has patrol tonight – he was already out on the highway,” Dean said. He waved to the driver of the patrol car as it pulled up to let him know everything was okay – the diner was full of people and there were no cars outside, that by itself would be suspicious – and then circled around the counter and went out to meet him. “Hey Luke,” he said when the other man got out of his car. “Welcome to Excitement Central.”

“No, that’s the station,” Luke replied, shaking his head. He was just slightly younger than Dean appeared to be, and his short sand-blond hair was disordered in a way that said he’d been running his hand through it in frustration. “I got called in early to help deal with stupid stuff, and then they sent me out early to deal with weird stuff.”

Dean raised an eyebrow, leaning against the patrol car. “What’d I miss?”

“Stupid stuff and weird stuff,” Luke reiterated. “For starters, your DEA guys found their way out to the RV cooker and set off his set, blew everybody involved to kingdom come – only plus side to that is no more creepy guy in a rubber apron and tighty whities running around out there with his boy toy anymore. But when Colonel called up the agency to tell them they’d just lost two of theirs to a bad case of stupid, they swore they didn’t have people out here at all. So we called the CIT company, and they said the two guys who’d commandeered their truck had all the right paperwork and authorizations to prove they were who they said they were. So either the feds are playing games with them or someone else is playing games with the feds. Then the weird calls started to come in, black helicopters and robots and people runnin’ around in the rocks with guns, and I get sent out to follow up with everyone who called in. And then I saw a black helicopter myself and had to call that in, and right after that Dispatch calls me to say I need to get out here because you just called in a body someone found. And what do you know, I get here and you have a diner full of people but not a single vehicle in sight. I don’t suppose any of them flew in on a black helicopter, did they?” Dean shook his head, and Luke sighed. “Everything’s crazy, Dean. It’s usually so quiet out here, I feel like I woke up in Night Vale or something.”

To his surprise Dean chuckled, straightening away from the car again. “Interesting you’d say that. And I’ll apologize in advance, because I’m about to make your night even weirder. If you want to grab a bag, there’s a big piece of evidence just past the parking lot you should probably pick up so nobody runs over it.”

“Evidence?”

“The dead guy was here and alive before he was a body, and his arm is still out there just past the parking area. I didn’t want to bring it into the diner, so I just left it there.”

Luke blinked at him. “I…his arm?”

“It’s metal, not a real arm,” Dean clarified. “I still didn’t want to bring it in, though.”

“Okay.” Luke got some gloves and a bag from the kit in his trunk and then walked out with Dean to see the arm. Which looked disturbing in a sci-fi way instead of a gross way. Overlapping metal plates, machinery visible where it had been cleanly severed up near the shoulder. Really cleanly severed, just sheared off in a nice straight line. There wasn’t any blood up on that end, but the knuckles of the metal hand were bloody, like the arm’s owner had been beating the crap out of somebody with it. Luke raised an eyebrow at his friend. “This was actually attached to someone?”

“Oh yeah. He was moving it and using it just like it was a real arm.”

Luke made a mental note to put the robot sighting down as a possible misidentification. “So…sort of like a prosthesis?” Dean nodded. Luke took some pictures with his phone and then picked the arm up, having to use both hands because it was heavy and not as stiff as it looked like it would be, and then with Dean’s help he got it into the bag and carried it back to secure it in the trunk of the patrol car. “So this guy showed up here…”

“Probably better if you get the whole story in order,” Dean cut him off. “Things didn’t start with this crazy asshole, they started with his boss and I’m not the one who you need to talk to about him. Now come on in and bring your mug, I’ll fix you up with some coffee while you do your thing and then Clint and I will go with you to find the body.” Luke started to open his mouth, and Dean shook his head. “I’m not letting just the two of you go out there without backup, buddy, and the other guys are more than able to look after Steve and the diner. Just because we think all the bad guys are gone doesn’t mean we’re right.”

We? “Steve needs looked after why?”

“He’s got a broken leg and a bad case of stubborn.”

Luke had to grin. “Somethin’ you both have in common, then,” he teased, giving Dean a comradely smack on the shoulder. He reached back into his car for his travel mug, letting Dean take it from him as they went back into the diner, and then did a double-take when he recognized the older man sitting at the counter. “Well, crap, I owe Mrs. Robbins an apology – she swore she saw Iron Man fly over.”

“Since she usually calls Doug to say she saw flying saucers, no one’s gonna blame you for not believing her this time.” Dean went back behind the counter, waving the hand not holding the travel mug at the other people in the diner. “Guys, this is Lieutenant Snow. Luke, you’re looking at Tony, Steve, Clint, Bruce and Cecil.”

“You can all just call me Luke, we’re not too formal out here,” Luke corrected. “Mr. Stark, were you out here to fight the guy with the metal arm?”

Tony shook his head. “I actually got here too late to do anything but hold the door so everyone else could come back inside,” he admitted. “The fight was already over when I showed up.”

“So there was a fight, okay.” Luke looked around at the others, did another double-take at the obviously homemade splint on Steve’s leg. “Wait a minute, you got hurt here? Why didn’t someone call for an ambulance? Dean…”

“It’s okay, it’s healing,” Steve interrupted him. “And it didn’t happen today, it happened before I got here a…couple of days ago?” Bruce and Tony both nodded, and he sighed. “They made me sit this one out.”

“People with a broken leg don’t get to fight, Steve,” Bruce scolded mildly. The scientist shrugged when Luke looked at him. “He did try to insist on joining in, but we wouldn’t let him.”

“I wouldn’t have let him either,” Luke agreed. And then the name in conjunction with the dog tags and present company registered and his eyes widened as he had his third or fourth oh-shit moment of the evening. We. “Wait a minute, you’re…”

“Only when I’m in uniform,” Steve interrupted quickly. “When I’m out here, I’m just Steve the tattoo artist.”

Luke nodded. “I can understand that – my boss says the same thing when he’s not wearin’ his uniform. And you are one hell of a tattoo artist, the ones you did for Dean are somethin’ else. So you two are…?” Steve blushed but nodded, and Luke gave him a smile. “Glad to hear it, he’s always happier when you’ve been out here – maybe now that it’s official he’ll stay that way.” He blinked at the second booth. “Okay, so you guys are the rest of the Avengers?”

“Yes, the only one not here is Thor,” Steve said, before anyone else could say anything, pointing out each person in turn. “Clint, Bruce, and Cecil – you already know Dean.”

“Well, I thought I did.” He winked at Dean when he said it, though. “Can understand why he didn’t say anything, though. Retired?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Dean admitted with a shrug. “Still will be, for the most part, unless Benny sells the diner out from under me. I’ve actually been thinking about trying to buy the place from him. I like it out here, it’s usually nice and quiet and I’ve got a lot of friends in the area I don’t feel like giving up.”

He was telling the truth, he had been thinking about that lately, and he was pleasantly surprised when Luke beamed like it was his birthday. “I’m glad to hear that – the other guys will be too, and the colonel. He’s said before that he likes you bein’ out here. He’s the one you need to charge double for the coffee, by the way.”

Dean almost dropped the coffeepot. “The colonel was betting on my love life?”

Luke snorted. “Colonel’s the one who started the pool, Dean. He’d probably have been out here himself already if we hadn’t all woke up in Night Vale this morning.”

Cecil sat up a little straighter at that, although he slumped right back down again almost immediately. “Ah, my public,” he murmured, and then intoned, “Welcome…to Night Vale.”

Luke all but jumped out of his skin, and Bruce snickered. “Sorry, Cecil wore himself out earlier, so he’s…not all the way here right now. Please tell me you don’t need to question him, that could get weird in a hurry.”

“I…I can wait to do that, things are weird enough now. So he’s the guy…” Bruce nodded, and so did Cecil. Luke blinked; for a second, when his bangs had moved, it had almost looked like Cecil had…but no, it couldn’t be. He turned his attention to Clint. “Okay, I’ve seen you out here before with Steve, Clint. Your bike…”

“It’s in Dean’s shed, with Bruce’s and Cecil’s.”

Luke made another mental note that their ‘DEA’ idiots had possibly been sniffing around after the Avengers. Colonel was gonna love that. “So you found the body.”

“Yeah,” Clint confirmed. “My former partner was out there – getting away from the guy, I’d been running interference – and I went after her to make sure he didn’t get her again. I heard a gunshot, tracked that down to the guy’s boss firing at the rocks for some reason, and then backtracked the boss and found him. He’d been shot in the back of the head.”

“You know who he was?”

Clint nodded. “His code name was Winter Soldier. The Russians trained him as an assassin, but he’d been workin’ for an organization called SHIELD in this country. His boss was a guy called Nick Fury. Fury used to be our boss, too, but we cut ties a while back.”

“That’s who you think killed him?” Clint nodded again. “Any idea why he’d do that?”

“My guess is it’s because the guy ran, and when Fury went after him he didn’t want to come back.”

“This Fury guy was here at the diner too?”

“Twice,” Clint told him. “Showed up the first time in a black helicopter…” He grinned when Luke made a face. “Yeah, it’s cliché but it suits the bastard’s M.O. Bruce chased him off that time, or so we thought, but then we found out he hadn’t gone all that far away and we realized the first visit had been a setup, he was seein’ who was here and who wasn’t. The Soldier showed up right after that, and then Fury came back out a little bit later. He’d been back in the rocks, watchin’.”

“And probably touching himself,” Cecil murmured, and Luke jumped again. The older man blinked at him, luckily with only his two visible eyes this time. “Guys like that get off on it, sweetheart. Ask your colonel, he’ll tell you.”

“Cecil, drink your milkshake,” Dean ordered. “You can’t talk to Luke or anyone else official until you’re…rational again.” Bruce started to open his mouth; Dean cut him off. “No, not a word – you’re picking it up from him, Bruce, I can tell. Cecil, if you behave I’ll get you a chicken to keep out at the power station, all right? The kind with all the feathers on their legs, those look like they should live in Night Vale.”

The older man was immediately interested. “Will it lay colored eggs?”

“You can get them to do that with special food,” Luke chimed in, seeing that Dean was at a loss and Tony had immediately tried to google the answer on his phone. Cecil beamed and applied himself to his milkshake, and Luke went back to questioning Clint. “Okay, so this Fury guy came out, and then what?”

“No idea, the Soldier had knocked me for a loop by that point, I was on the ground. I don’t know anything that happened after that until Cecil…helped me up.”

The hesitation had been telling, and Luke’s eyes narrowed. “Something you don’t want to tell me?”

“Yeah, the weird parts.” Clint sighed. “Dean, this is more your area than mine. The weirdest I ever get is aliens, and nobody I’m supposed to answer ever asks me to explain those.”

Dean considered that, then pushed Luke’s filled travel mug across the counter and moved the diner’s phone over to join it. “Call the colonel, Luke. If we tell you this story and you repeat it to him, he’ll be making you pee in a cup or get a psych eval, maybe both. Tell him you’ve got the Avengers out here and you’re not sure how much of this statement can actually go on-record because it involves covert agents and stuff. Then while he drives out, you and I and Clint will go out to see the body and come back.”

“I like that plan, I’m happy to be a part of it.” Luke plopped down on a stool and picked up the receiver on the phone, dialing the station. “Doug, it’s Luke, I’m out at the diner and I need the colonel. Maybe, but first I just need to ask him somethin’. I got out here and…yeah, more weird shit, but this may be the source of all our other weird shit and I’m thinkin’ I may be in over my head.” He waited. “Colonel…no sir, not like that. But the Avengers are out here, there were spooks in black helicopters involved, and the dead guy was apparently a Russian assassin with a metal arm which is now in an evidence bag in my trunk because there was a fight and it got cut off. Yeah…yeah, exactly. They’ve got no problem giving me their statements, but they’re afraid you’ll ship me off to rehab or the looney bin when I hand my report in if they tell me all of it.” He listened, nodding. “We’re gonna go out to see the body, Dean and the guy who found it and I, Dean says we’ll be back before you get here. No sir…no, he said he wasn’t lettin’ me and Clint go out there alone since they can’t be sure all the spooks are gone. Yeah, apparently he is one of them, he’s just mostly retired.” He started at something, eyebrows going up in surprise. “I…Dean, he wants to know if you’re bulletproof. Doesn’t sound like he’s kidding, either.” Dean made a face, but nodded. “Yeah, Colonel, apparently. No, I’m not smackin’ him for you, his boyfriend might not like it. Yes, he’s here, but he’s got a broken leg…no, fight before this one, Mr. Stark dropped him off here a few days ago…yeah, that would be him, but he says he’s just a tattoo artist when he’s out here. They wouldn’t let him fight with a broken leg, he was kind of put out about that, said it was his responsibility…okay.” He turned around to look at Steve. “Colonel says you need smacked too.”

“Bruce got me earlier.”

Luke nodded. “One of his buddies got him earlier, Colonel. Yeah, I’ll help ride herd until you get here…okay…okay, yeah, got it. Yes sir, see you in a bit.” He hung up and pushed the phone back over to Dean, then pointed an admonishing finger at Steve. “Colonel says you keep your ass right where it’s at and out of things, Steve – he says he used to be Army too, and he outranks you. Clint, Dean, he said I can go ahead and have you guys show me the body, maybe take some pictures of it, but he wants it left where it is and after that he wants me to sit tight here at the diner for a while. He’s waiting to hear back from some people about the other two dead spooks from this morning, he’ll see if they want this one too. No sense in us doin’ paperwork we’ll just have to tear up.”

That got a round of agreement, and then Clint peeled himself out of his booth and Dean told Tony he was in charge and the three of them trooped out into the desert night with the big flashlight from Luke’s trunk and a road emergency warning sign to leave by the body. Clint explained on the way out who the Winter Soldier had been and why he hadn’t wanted to use the guy’s name in front of Steve, and Luke assured him he was fine with that. He asked about Steve’s broken leg and winced when they told him what had happened, making yet another mental note to track down Dr. Dave later and get at least an unofficial statement from him.

The body was a ways out – the guy had definitely been trying to run away – but they finally got to it and Luke took a couple of pictures with his phone while Dean held the flashlight, then set the flashing sign so whoever finally came for the body wouldn’t have to hunt for it in the dark. When he mentioned how clean the cut was that had severed the metal arm, Dean admitted to being the one who had done that part before telling the assassin to run and not come back; he didn’t say what kind of thing he’d used to cut the arm off, and Luke decided that meant it must be more weird stuff so he decided he’d let the colonel ask about that later if it was something they needed to know. Then he had Clint show him where he’d seen Fury shooting at the rocks. Not only was there a scar on the rock from the bullet, but the bullet was still there too so Luke took a few more pictures of that and then put the bullet into an evidence bag. Probably wouldn’t do any good to try to have it run through the system – he didn’t expect the head spook over all the other spooks to be using a traceable weapon – but at least they’d have it to match to the one in the dead guy, and in case they found any more bullets later that might have come from the same gun. Hopefully not in any other dead guys.

Once they got back to the diner, Steve asked Luke if he could see the pictures. “I…I can positively ID him,” he said. “He was in my unit, I owe him that much.” Luke didn’t think he agreed with him about that – Clint had had a lot to say about the Winter Soldier, specifically about the crazy bastard’s obsession with killing his former best friend and how close he’d already come to doing it a couple of times – but he handed over his phone and Steve looked for a long moment before handing it back. “His name was James Buchanan Barnes – Sergeant Barnes,” he informed Luke quietly. “He was declared MIA in 1945, they have a memorial up for him at the Smithsonian. He wasn’t always…crazy. The people who captured him made him that way.”

“That sucks,” Luke told him, and called the colonel back to let him know their dead body had been positively ID’d as a missing war hero. The colonel swore for nearly a minute straight, then said he was coming out and bringing the wagon with him to pick up the soldier’s body and spooks be damned. He reiterated that he wanted Luke to sit tight before he hung up, so Luke sipped his coffee and kept himself from getting a piece of pie he didn’t need by making small talk with the Avengers. Who all relaxed once they realized he wasn’t going to go fanboy on them and actually made small talk back, which was nice.

A customer came in, young and kind of scruffy looking, and took a seat at the counter a few stools down from Luke. Dean got him what he wanted – which was pie and coffee, of course – and the guy applied himself to it a little too intently, casting frequent sidelong glances at Luke. Clint finally called him on it, rolling his eyes. “Dude, he could care less about the dime-bag in your back pocket, really – he can’t even see it. And if you were that worried about it, why’d you come in here when you saw the cop car parked in front? Do you just play a druggie on TV or what?”

The guy turned halfway around and gave him a look of absolute horror, and this time Luke rolled his eyes. “He’s right, tonight I don’t give a damn what you’re carryin’ unless you’re dumb enough to try to sell it to me. You might want to clear out before my colonel gets here, though, he’s havin’ a bad night.” He thought of something. “Oh, and if you were headed out to that cooker’s place, don’t bother – couple of DEA agents went out there this morning and the whole place blew.”

The guy almost dropped his fork. “They blew him up?!”

Luke nodded. “And themselves right along with him. Take my advice, find another place to get your stuff that ain’t around here. Place is gonna be crawlin’ with feds for weeks, they even had helicopters out here earlier.” He cast a sidelong glance of his own. “The black unmarked kind, I’m sure you know what that means. We already found one body out a little ways from here, shot in the back of the head.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Missin’ an arm, even. Somebody’s tyin’ up loose ends.”

The guy nodded violently, then inhaled the rest of his pie and coffee and put money down…and then he seemed to think of something, shooting another sidelong glance at Luke, and fished out another couple of bills to put down on the counter, muttering something about a tip and pie for everyone ‘cause it had been really good, and then he all but ran out to his rust-riddled car and drove away in the direction he’d come from. Clint laughed so hard he had tears in his eyes, the other Avengers weren’t far behind him, and Luke chuckled into his coffee. Dean picked up the bills and looked at them. “First time anyone’s ever left me two hundred-dollar bills as a tip. You want these, Luke?”

Luke shook his head. “I’d have to go after him and then do paperwork. Besides, he said pie for everyone – the way I see it, he was just buyin’ you all a round.”

Dean snorted. “Just say you want pie, Luke. Your girlfriend’s the one who nags you about what you eat, and she’s not here. Besides, you’ve gotten enough exercise tonight to burn it off. A la mode?”

“I hate you.”

“Nope, but I’m sure your girlfriend does – seriously, dude, find one that’s not a diet-obsessed harpy. Even the other guys say she’s making you miserable.” He cut a generous piece of pie – blueberry custard today, with a streusel top – and crowned it with an equally generous scoop of vanilla ice cream. “There, compliments of the nice perp who wanted to treat everyone. Who else…” Everyone else’s hand went up; Tony raised both of his. Dean chuckled and shook his head, but dished up the rest of the pie and passed it around. Then he went back into the freezer and pulled out an apple pie, popping it into the oven just in case anyone else came in wanting pie later. It wasn’t homemade, but apple was a classic nobody ever complained about.

Chapter Text

Everyone had finished eating and the dishes were all cleared away by the time the colonel showed up with the county coroner. Luke went out to talk to him first, and once he was well away from the diner’s door Dean leaned on the counter and raised an eyebrow at Steve. “Funny, I don’t remember being an Avenger when I got up this morning.”

Steve shrugged. “You are if I say you are, and Cecil is too – not like anyone’s going to contradict me. I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to talk to you about it first, but I had to claim you both for your own protection.”

“Our team is exempt from prosecution for anything we have to do when we’re on-duty,” Tony explained. “The President said so. We promised we wouldn’t get creative with the definition of ‘on-duty’ and he believed Steve – because who wouldn’t – so he signed an executive order just for us.”

“That means no one can sue us, or say we’re vigilantes and declare a manhunt,” Clint chimed in, and frowned when Bruce flinched. “Stop that, it applies to you too.”

“That probably depends on who you’re asking,” Bruce corrected. He saw Dean’s look and flinched again. “I wasn’t always able to control the change – it used to happen any time I got mad, and I got mad pretty easily. The Army spent a lot of time chasing me.”

“Yeah, because they wanted to catch green lightning in a bottle and weaponize it,” Clint rebutted. “Even the president said that was them bein’ idiots, Bruce.”

“And the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with him,” Tony added. “I believe his exact words were, ‘You don’t stop a stampeding bull by pissing it off’.”

“He says things like that all the time,” Steve put in, and everybody stared at him. “What? He emails me sometimes to ask how things are going, or if he has questions about something we did. He invited me to come watch the Army-Navy game with him in December, the Secretary of Defense bet that the Navy would win last year and lost so Will gets the suite at the stadium this year.” He blinked at Dean. “Do you like college football? He said I could bring a guest as long as it wasn’t Tony.”

That got a snort from Tony. “I don’t have to be anyone’s guest. I have my own suite, thank you very much.”

Dean was trying and failing to wrap his mind around the idea of being casually invited to watch a football game by someone that high up the governmental food chain. “I like football, yeah – college ball is usually better than pro anyway. So we’d be watching the game at…?”

“The White House’s private suite at the stadium in Philly,” Clint told him. He was trying not to crack up. “You should go, Dean. General Grey’s a good guy, really plain-spoken, kind of sarcastic – you’ll like him. I’ll come run the diner while you’re gone.”

Dean shook himself. “Benny might have something to say about that.”

“Um, probably not.” Tony started to fidget when everyone looked at him. “Benny…well, he won’t have anything to say about it, because he sort of kind of doesn’t own the diner anymore.”

Steve sat up a little straighter, eyes narrowing. “Tony, what did you do?”

“He was going to sell it! He’s old, and he’d had what he thought were developers sniffing around and offering him move-to-Florida money for the property.”

Bruce’s eyes had narrowed too. “They weren’t developers?”

Tony shrugged. “I don’t know who the fuck they were – Jarvis couldn’t find any trace of them. But they were still pushing the old guy pretty hard to let it go, basically offering him anything he wanted, so…”

Dean closed his dropped-open mouth with an effort, disappointed and relieved all at the same time. “So you own the diner now?”

“Nope.” Tony pointed at Steve. “He does.”

Steve’s blue eyes went so wide it was almost comical. “How do I own it?”

To Dean’s surprise, Clint and Bruce both started to laugh, and Tony rolled his eyes. “I am so not explaining to you again how bonds work – as in the ones you accepted in lieu of pay when you were in the USO, and which your very grateful government made good on once they were forced to accept that you were alive? Which may be one of the only good and decent things SHIELD ever did for you, by the way. But anyway, Jarvis was suspicious about the nonexistent developers and so was I, so I told my financial guys that you wouldn’t want the property to be sold off to some shadow company. And since my financial guys are also your financial guys and you gave me authority to tell them to do things for you, they swooped in and bought the property in your name and ever since then Benny has been very lackadaisically managing things from Florida when he’s not drunk and trying to catch VD. Honestly, I’m not sure his version of Florida living isn’t running the old guy’s personal countdown timer into the single-digits at this point, but that’s where he wanted to be so at least he’ll die happy.”

By this point both Steve and Dean looked shell-shocked. “Welcome to Tony-Land; you’ll get used to it,” Clint reassured Dean. “And hey, now you don’t have to worry about anyone selling the diner out from under you.”

There was that. “The ‘developers’ were probably angels, or someone working with them,” Dean observed slowly, frowning. “I’ll check into that the next time I see Sammy or Crowley.” He gave his worried boyfriend a crooked smile. “I’m okay with it if you are.”

Steve smiled back. “I’m okay with it – but we’re borrowing Tony’s little building robots to make the living quarters downstairs bigger.”

“It’s an old bomb shelter, circa the actual 1950s rather than faux-retro Fallout,” Bruce explained to Tony. “Gotta hand it to whoever built it, though, because it stays so cool down there you’d swear it’s air-conditioned. Those cinderblock walls are probably three feet thick.”

“Once the guys are done, you can go down there and look around if you want,” Dean told Tony, who was looking interested. “Maybe catch some shuteye while you’re down there, too – you look like you need it.”

“We’ll take him down with us,” Cecil said. He sounded a lot more with-it now, although he still looked tired. “Bruce and I will put the laundry in for you before we turn in, Dean.”

“And then tomorrow we’ll head back home,” Bruce added. “Hopefully Luke’s boss out there won’t have a problem with that.”

Outside, the coroner and his people had been dispatched to get the body and Luke was having a conversation of his own with his boss. “I’m in over my head, I don’t deny it,” Luke was telling him, leaning against the side of the patrol car. “It’s weird, though – they all seem like nice, regular guys, and now that I know Dean’s one of them…well, I feel stupid for not seein’ it before.”

“He was careful not to give you any reason to see it before,” Colonel Darville told him. He was an older man, his air of casual authority enhanced by a splendid mustache which was mostly white while his hair was splitting the difference between white and gray. He looked like a man who laughed a lot, but still not anyone you’d want to piss off. “I knew he was some kind of fighter when I first saw him – it’s the stance that gives them away, and the look in their eyes when you get close enough to see it. And I knew what kind of fighting he’d been doing when I checked him out to make sure.” He smiled when Luke scowled at him, the corners of his brown eyes crinkling. “Wasn’t any reason for you boys to know, Luke – it would’ve made you look at him funny, and he didn’t need that. He’s had things in place to keep his kind of trouble away from here since he first showed up, too, and I appreciated that. It told me he was out here to stay, not just to stop.”

“His kind…”

“Weird stuff, Luke, let it go. If you ever need to know, he’ll tell you or I will.”

Luke accepted that. He’d been working for Darville long enough to trust him if he said there was something they didn’t need to poke with a stick. “Okay. So did you know the guy who lives out at the old power station…”

“Is the radio guy from Night Vale? Yeah.” From inside the diner, Cecil leaned over to look out the window at him, then waved. With one hand and one tentacle, which made pretty much everyone else inside the diner react and made Darville laugh so hard he had to lean against the police car and wipe his eyes. He clapped his wide-eyed lieutenant on the shoulder. “That, however, I did not know about, and I’m guessing you didn’t either. Tell you what, you go back up the doc and his people, just in case any more funny stuff starts up out there, while I go in and hear a really wild story we can’t put in the report. Want me to save you a piece of pie?”

Luke shook his head. “I already had pie, Dean made me. He called my girlfriend a diet-obsessed harpy.”

“And he’s not wrong,” Darville responded. “Even my wife doesn’t like her, Luke, and that’s sayin’ somethin’.” He watched the younger man leave, then pushed open the diner’s door and stepped in, inhaling deeply. “Oh good, I like apple. How much longer ‘til she’s done, Dean?”

“About fifteen more minutes, Colonel, then ten on the counter to set.” Dean raised an eyebrow. “I hear you won a bet?”

The older man just grinned at him. “When you’re my age, you’ll be amused by how much the younger ones get in their own way when they’re tryin’ to hook up too. So I’m payin’ double for coffee tonight?”

Dean smirked and shook his head. “Nope, the last customer left a big tip, said pie and coffee for everyone because it was so good. So you’re covered.”

“Always happy to let someone else buy a round.” Darville made himself at home on one of the stools and slapped his knee, looking around at everyone. “All righty then, let’s get this out of the way while I wait for that pie to come out of the oven. I’m Colonel Darville, I head up the State Highway Patrol here in this little patch of desert heaven. So far nobody I’ve called has gotten back to me, but I’ve got fake DEA agents splattered all over the rocks on one side of the highway, a dead war hero minus an arm on the other side, and the Avengers camped out in my favorite place to eat right in the middle. So I want to know what the hell’s going on whether I can use it in a report or not.” He waved Dean out from behind the counter. “Get out here and sit with your boyfriend so I don’t have to turn around to look at you, Dean. ‘His gun misfired’ my ass. No wonder the little bastard pissed himself – I might piss myself too if I shot some guy point blank in the chest and he just stood there lookin’ at me and then asked if that was the best I could do.”

“Wasn’t like I could tell you what really happened, Colonel.” Dean got the man a cup of coffee, then circled around to sit in the booth across from Steve. Or at least that’s what he’d been planning to do, but Darville had already made Tony take that spot so he ended up sitting next to Steve, who shifted around to make room for him and draped a casual arm over his shoulder. Which was nice and felt really right, so Dean relaxed against him just enough to make it mutual. “So…?”

“I want it from the beginning.”

Tony sighed. “I guess that’s with me, then. We stopped working directly for SHIELD last year, but we’d still go on missions for them if they called us in – some things you need a team of superheroes to handle, we were all fine with that, it’s our job and we’re good at it. But this last one, only Steve and I were at the mansion when they called, and Fury told us he thought the two of us would be enough.”

“He said it would be reconnaissance, mostly,” Steve chimed in. “It wasn’t the first time we’d gone out on a mission like that, so we didn’t think much about it. But then they sent us out in the middle of nowhere, this little compound that looked abandoned but for some reason was still active enough to be jamming our communications, and the building that was supposed to be the ‘lab’ turned out to be rigged to collapse. Luckily we were right by the outside wall when it started to go, if we’d been in the center we’d both be dead.”

“Steve saw the wall coming down and shoved me into it; it fell around me, not on top of me,” Tony continued. “So I was able to get free of the rubble pretty easily, and then I had to dig him out. Which was about when SHIELD showed up, two agents in a car that I kind of remembered passing on our way out to the site. They said they were there to help, but the minute I turned my back on them they attacked me. With something that froze up my suit – the lighter-weight hazmat-type suit Fury had recommended I use, no less – but it didn’t work instantly like they seemed to have thought it would so I still kicked ass. And a third guy who came out of nowhere got beaned in the head with a chunk of concrete Steve threw at him, which left me standing there with a useless suit that was actually starting to disintegrate around me, a broken supersoldier who couldn’t even form a coherent sentence, and three beaten SHIELD agents who’d been sent there to do god knows what to us.” He shrugged. “I did the only thing I could think of: I tied them up, stole their car because one of the bastards had disabled ours, and hauled ass back to civilization with Steve, hoping I wasn’t going to be met at every gas station along the way by SHIELD agents with guns. I dropped Steve off here so the others could look after him.”

“Dave was here, he helped me get Steve down into the basement,” Dean said. “Bruce and Cecil showed up about half an hour later. But the armored truck was here around 7am, just like usual, so either those are the world’s most efficient spooks or they’d already been planning to come out here.”

“They can be that efficient when they want to be,” Tony told him. “Not always the smartest agents, but the organization can move so fast it’s scary.”

“But they were probably planning to come out here anyway,” Bruce contradicted, shaking his head. “They didn’t just want you and Steve, Tony, they wanted all of us – Dean included.”

“Except for me,” Cecil put in, pushing his bangs back and opening his third eye, which got a raised eyebrow from the colonel. “Yeah. Seems kind of odd to me that they didn’t know…something, you know? Not knowing anything about the person one of your targets is living with is just sloppy – not to mention, my husband had worked for them on a related project to the one Bruce was involved with, so they seemingly dropped two connections not one. And that sounds out of character.”

“It does,” Darville agreed. “We’re not gonna worry about that right now, though – borrowing trouble just gets you more, and I think we’ve already got plenty for the time being. What I really want to know is should I be expecting more of this spooky stuff in the near future or did you boys push back hard enough to keep them off for a while?”

“I don’t think they’ll come back any time soon,” Steve told him. “They lost the only two agents who were in our league, and they lost some…backup they’d connected with at the same time. Not to mention, they can’t just come attack us, the President would hand them their asses.”

Tony almost spit out the mouthful of coffee he’d just taken, and Darville laughed. “He probably would, yeah. The talking heads on television like to make out that Whitmore’s some kind of pansy, but the man was a fighter pilot before he was a politician and those boys are flat-out crazy bastards if you get ‘em riled up. So what was this backup they lost?”

Dean raised his hand. “That was my kind of weird, Colonel. They were working with…well, angels. Bad ones.”

“Fallen angels?”

“No, a lot of the regular ones went bad – according to them, they got sick of us so ending the world seemed like a good solution. But I have things fixed so they can’t get in here.” Darville was nodding. “You knew?”

“That you had the place warded against something? Of course I did, Dean. I didn’t tell any of the boys what I found out about you, but I knew as much as I needed to know.” He smiled. “Real glad to hear you want to stick around, by the way, we like you out here. Talked to Benny yet?”

“Turns out I don’t have to.” Steve stiffened behind him, and Dean reached up and squeezed his hand. “Meet the new owner, Colonel.”

“I just found out right before you came in,” Steve disclaimed immediately, waving his free hand at Tony. “I let him help me with my money, so when he saw something funny going on with the diner’s owner, he bought it on my behalf.”

Tony shrugged. “It was either that or buy it myself, and I didn’t want a diner.” His phone buzzed and he looked at it, and then he looked back up at Darville in disbelief. “Wait, you’re…no fucking way!”

The older man sighed. “Yes fucking way, actually – and no it didn’t happen like it did in the movie, and no I don’t want to talk about it right now. Because Avengers in this diner, dead guys all over the place, and nobody higher up is returning my calls. We can talk about how much fun Marshal Justice had makin’ up that cockamamie story about me and Luke’s daddy some other time.”

“I would drive back out here for that – and bring the good liquor,” Tony told him. He waved a careless hand at the rest of the Avengers. “The rest of them are all too young to know what we’re talking about anyway – except Steve, of course, he’s too old.”

Dean felt the huff and leaned back a little harder. “You’re still younger than me, and you always will be. I’m gonna be getting teased about having a pretty blond boytoy literally forever.”

That made Steve laugh and hug him, and Tony rolled his eyes. Which made Cecil swat Tony on the back of the head with a tentacle, which made Clint and Bruce laugh until they almost cried. And then the timer dinged to let them know the pie was done, and Clint got up to get it before Dean could disentangle himself. “No, you stay there, I’ve got it. Not like we all haven’t had a long night.”

“A long few days, you mean.” Bruce stretched. “So, Colonel…what now?”

Darville shrugged. “Well, I’m gonna have a piece of pie, and then once the doc comes back Luke and I are gonna escort Sergeant Barnes back to town. Captain, do you know what he…”

“Cremate him,” Steve said. “If you don’t they’ll…someone will dig him up. I can take his ashes to someone who can get them interred at Arlington, though, and then that will be that.”

“Can do,” the colonel assured him. “I’ll bring them to you here, probably tomorrow night – Doc’s not gonna like the idea of grave robbers very much, he’ll be gung-ho to make sure that can’t happen. I’ll put one of the boys with him just in case anyone comes knocking who shouldn’t be – most likely Luke for that, anything to keep him away from that thing he’s dating.”

“I told him she was a harpy.” Dean got up anyway to help Clint find things. “Oh, by the way, Colonel, Clint will be running the diner for me for about a week in November. I’m going with Steve to see the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.”

Darville turned around at that to raise an eyebrow at Clint. “You make pie?”

Clint shook his head. “Nope, but I make the best damn chocolate chip cookies you’ve ever eaten in your life.”

“He does,” Tony agreed, covering a yawn with his hand. “So, are we done here? Because I have a basement to evaluate, preferably by sleeping in it.”

“We’re done, it’s pie time,” Darville told him, and slapped him on the back as he walked by. “I like Scotch, by the way.”

Tony grinned. “I have Scotch – and it’s always more fun to drink it with another grownup.” He had to dance out of the way of another tentacle swat. “Bruce, control your boyfriend!”

“I like him like this.” Bruce and Cecil had peeled themselves out of their booth as well, and they both shook hands with the colonel. “It was a pleasure, Colonel. If we don’t see you again before we head back home…”

“I know where to find you,” Darville said, nodding. “And if you’re staying out here, Dr. Banner…would you be willing to come help if we have a bad rockslide or stupid climbers that get stuck? Because I would appreciate the hell out of bein’ able to call you in. We’re too far out for help to make good time getting to us in an emergency.”

Bruce’s smile could have lit up the parking lot. “I’ll give him your phone number,” Steve said. “Go sleep, guys, you need it. And Tony will sleep if you do.”

“Point,” Cecil agreed. “And you will be?”

Steve sighed. “Here in this booth, watching everyone else do things.”

“Good boy.” Cecil ruffled his hair, and then herded Bruce and Tony down into the basement. The water could be heard running shortly thereafter, letting everyone know that the laundry was getting done.

Dean rejoined Steve in the booth, letting Clint do the dishes while the colonel ate his pie, and let himself relax. The highway was empty, the way it usually was at this time of night, and really all he had to do right now was sit here, make aimless conversation, and reflect on the fact that being lonely was highly overrated.

Chapter Text

People say there is a diner on old Highway 49, a place called the Last Chance that’s halfway between any other places you might actually want to be. It’s only open at night, the owners are surprisingly young and some of the regulars are more than a little weird…but you can get a damned fine piece of pie there, every day of the week.