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Chapter Text

Dean Winchester had been in Belle Reve for at least a month. At least that was what he thought; time got pretty fucking weird when you weren’t getting fed regularly, you couldn’t see the sun, and the lights went on and off more or less at random. He didn’t know where Sam was. He didn’t know if Cas knew where he was. All he knew was that he had been sitting in this same damn six-by-six-foot cell with no windows and a solid steel door for however long it had been, seeing virtually no one and talking to virtually no one.

If he hadn’t already been to Hell once, this would have driven him insane. As it was, it just sucked.

He was, therefore, pretty shocked when the door finally opened. A crew of guards clapped him into several sets of shackles and led him out into the prison at large. Dean kept his eyes and ears open, staring around at the corridors and trying to get his bearings. Everyone was dressed in head-to-toe riot gear and none of them made eye contact when Dean came by. The weird thing was that he didn’t see anything of any other people who were being held here. It was kinda creepy.

The guards hauled Dean into an elevator. He made sure to stay cooperative—if he wanted any chance of getting out of here, he didn’t want any more bruises than necessary.

When they emerged, they were in what was clearly some kind of administrative level. Things were cleaner and less bare-concrete-Alcatraz here, and Dean nodded appreciatively at the white walls and polished linoleum. A nice change from the filthy cell he’d been living in.

They shoved him in a door to a pretty decent office. There was a desk on the far side of the room with a swivel chair and a door behind it, and two chairs facing it. When Dean saw who was sitting in one of the chairs in front of the desk, his heart leaped. “Sammy!”

Sam turned around as far as his shackles allowed, grinning hugely. “Dean!” he said. “I knew you were okay.”

“Shut up,” one of the guards snarled, shoving Dean into the chair beside Sam.

Dean shut his mouth, but tossed a sideways smile at Sam. Sam’s smile seemed a little more tense, now that the initial relief of reunion was over. Dean noticed that Sam was being careful to keep his sleeves pulled down, which was weird, but everybody picked up some kind of tic while they were in prison. This wasn’t the most impossible situation they’d ever been in, and as long as they were both okay, things would definitely work out.

Suddenly, the door behind the desk opened and a middle-aged black woman wearing a sharp suit and carrying a briefcase walked in. The guards in the room snapped to attention as she did, and she didn’t bother to put them at ease. Instead, she just sat down at the chair behind the desk and folded her hands atop the desk. “Sam and Dean Winchester,” she said. “Sorry it’s taken me so long to get around to meeting you. I’ve heard a lot of stories about you boys.”

“And…who the hell are you?” Dean asked. Sam shot him a warning glare, but Dean was already feeling pretty hostile. He wasn’t going to back down from some administrative bureaucrat.

“My name is Amanda Waller,” the woman said. Under her gaze, Dean felt like he was being sized up. No big deal: he’d been sized up by worse. “I’m the director of Task Force X. And I’m here to make you a deal.”

“No deal,” Sam said coldly.

She smiled. “Just hear me out,” Waller said.

“Fuck you,” Sam said.

At that, Waller’s smile got, if possible, even wider. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say. You boys really are independent, aren’t you? Hear me out, and if you don’t buy what I’m selling…well, your cells will still be there later.”

“Let’s hear it,” Dean said, looking the woman in the eye. “And it better be good.”

Waller leaned back slightly in her chair. “As I said, I’m the director of the Task Force X program, better known as the Suicide Squad program. Of course you won’t have heard of it; the program is highly classified. You will, however, have heard of their results. This team is the group that dealt with the catastrophe in Midway City last year.”

Dean glanced at Sam. “You’re the news junkie,” he muttered.

Sam frowned in recollection. “It was all over the news last year, but we were…uh…preoccupied at the time,” he said. Dean winced, thinking about the Darkness. “All I know is that there was some kind of disaster and no one really knows how it got cleaned up.”

“A powerful metahuman known as the Enchantress ran amok,” Waller said. “She destroyed half the city, but Task Force X was able to bring her down. These people are the best of the best of metahumans, the kind of people who are capable of what normal folks might call miracles.”

“Huh,” Dean said, and chuckled. “How much do you know about us, Amanda?”

Waller narrowed her eyes. “I know enough,” she said.

“Then you know what we were doing last summer when your Midway City catastrophe happened,” Dean said. He leaned forward a bit, elbows on his knees, shackles clanking. “And you know we haven’t got time for this shit.”

“I think you do, Mr. Winchester,” Waller said. She reached down and picked up the briefcase, setting it down on the desk and unlocking it. Dean and Sam watched as she pulled out a pair of folders, labeled with “SAM WINCHESTER” and “DEAN WINCHESTER”. “You see, your activities haven’t been as secretive as you think. We’re well aware of the kind of thing that you two deal with. The only reason we haven’t interfered until now is that you’ve been doing more good than harm.”

“Fuck,” Sam muttered.

Waller continued as if Sam hadn’t interrupted. “We know about the creatures you two fight, about the knowledge you possess, and about your uncanny ability to survive damn near anything that you come up against. We are also aware that both of you have come back from the dead. Multiple times.”

“That’s true,” Dean said with a shrug. “So what?”

“So your skills are exactly the kind of skills that we need on Task Force X,” Waller said. She flipped open Dean’s file and absently scanned it as she spoke. “You know how to kill creatures that no normal human can even fight. You have powers that far exceed any ordinary person’s. You have access to vast resources to which the government is not privy. For all intents and purposes, both of you are better classed as a metahuman. And as your activities have taken on a wider and wider scope, we think that it’s time that you are put into the service of your country.”

“No,” Sam said loudly. Dean glanced at him and saw that his fists were clenched on the arms of the chair. “We aren’t going to just throw in with you guys, not after…the things you’ve done.” What ‘things’? That was a mildly terrifying statement. But Dean didn’t have a chance to ask what Sam meant.

Waller closed Dean’s file and set it carefully on top of Sam’s. Then she looked up at them, and her expression was like steel. “You don’t have a choice,” she said. “Either you join Task Force X and get some of your autonomy back by serving your country, or you go back to your cells and you rot. And don’t think that your angel friend can rescue you. We know how to ward against powers like his, and I can promise you that even if he gets into Belle Reve he’s not getting out.”

Dean’s stomach dropped and he thought involuntarily of Cas, who he’d been trying to put out of his mind. His feelings must have shown on his face, because Waller smirked. Sam cut in before she could speak, though. “You expect us to just stay with the Task Force and not run at the earliest opportunity?”

“Not necessarily,” Waller said. “But the nanite bombs implanted in your necks should serve as an adequate deterrent. If you run, you die.”

“I thought you wanted us on your team,” Dean said, trying to regain some of his lost momentum.

She shrugged. “You’re still expendable,” she said.

“Great,” Sam muttered.

Waller stood up, sweeping the files into the briefcase and locking it closed. “That’s all the time I have, gentlemen. If you won’t join now, then I’m afraid—”

Dean looked at Sam, and in their split-second moment of eye contact he understood exactly what they were going to do. It was the blessing and the curse of being so close to Sam. He always knew what Sam was thinking, and right now Sam was thinking that they should take the offer.

“We’ll do it,” Sam said, speaking for both of them, and Dean didn’t contradict him.

Slowly, Waller smiled a predatory smile. “Welcome to Task Force X, gentlemen,” she said.

***

Apparently joining Task Force X meant that they got out of the shackles. They didn’t get weapons or normal clothes, but, apparently, they’d get those eventually, when they were needed for an official mission with Task Force X. For now, they were going to meet their new direct supervisor.

“What kind of a name is Rick Flag?” Sam muttered as he and Dean were escorted down to the prison yard.

“No worse than ours,” Dean said with a philosophical shrug. Until he could get word to Cas and they could figure out how to get the nanite bombs out of them, he’d decided that he was going to bide his time and act like a good little soldier. It might not even be that bad. He knew how to do this.

When they came down the steps and out into the bright light, it took everything Dean had not to cover his eyes. After forever down in Belle Reve, the light fucking hurt. But he gritted his teeth and turned his face to the sun, trying to enjoy the warmth and ignore the pain.

As it turned out, Rick was a soldierly kind of guy. Not as tall as Sam and Dean, but strongly built with plenty of muscle. He carried himself like a soldier, and there was a certain solemnity about the eyes that told Dean this guy had seen some shit. He held out his hand as they approached. “Hey. I’m Colonel Rick Flag, the direct supervisor for Task Force X.”

Sam shook first. “Sam Winchester,” he said. Dean noticed that Sam squeezed Rick’s hand just a little too tight, but the soldier didn’t flinch at all.

“Dean Winchester,” Dean said, shaking the man’s hand. He had a good, honest grip. Seemed like a decent dude.

“I can’t say I’m glad to welcome you to the squad,” Rick said dryly, “but we can sure use your talent. If half Waller’s stories are true, you’ll fit right in.”

“She kept talking about metahumans,” Sam said, folding his arms. “People with powers. We haven’t got powers.”

Dean kept his mouth shut about how Sam was lying through his teeth. He still suspected that if they put demon blood back in Sam he’d be able to use all that psychic shit again. Hell, maybe he didn’t even need the demon blood. Maybe he could just do it, and he’d been refusing to out of some kind of principle or other. But these people didn’t need to know that. Though, by the way Rick looked at Sam, he apparently knew something Dean didn’t.

“Neither does Floyd or Harley or Harkness,” Rick said. He paused at their confused expressions and amended, “Deadshot, Harley Quinn, and Captain Boomerang. You might know them?”

“Nope,” Dean said cheerfully.

Rick nodded and sighed heavily. “Great. So you are completely out of the loop. You even know who Batman is?” Dean rolled his eyes and didn’t dignify that with a response. Neither did Sam. After an expectant pause, Rick went on. “Anyway. More than half our team hasn’t got real powers. Waylon and Chato are the only ones—callsigns are Killer Croc and El Diablo, in case you were wondering.”

So they only had two other people on the team with real superpowers. Good. Dean filed that away under ‘People Who Could Stop Us From Escaping This Hellhole’ and kept listening. “What does Task Force X actually do?” Sam was asking.

“We fight other metahumans,” Rick said. “With most of the big-name superheroes out of the picture, someone has to clean up the mess.”

“So we do that,” Dean mused. He folded his arms, taking his cue from the faint commotion at the doors behind them. “Cool. When do we get to meet the rest of this team?”

Rick’s eyes flicked over Dean’s shoulder, looking at the door. “Now, apparently,” he said.

As one, Dean and Sam turned to face the five people coming down the steps into the yard. They were a diverse group. In the lead was a sauntering woman with corpse-white skin and blue-and-red hair, bright eyes devouring the sight of Dean and Sam. Behind her was a handsome black man, about as tall as Dean, trimly built, whose expression was completely closed off. A white guy, grinning, with unkempt muttonchops and his hands in the pockets of his uniform, strolled along next to the black man. A much smaller man, bald, with a face tattooed to look like a skull, was just behind that pair. And hulking in the back was a huge guy, wearing a hooded jacket over his prison uniform despite the heat, with bizarrely scaly skin and sharp teeth that showed every time his mouth moved. Dean had seen some intimidating people in his life, but this crew was definitely one of the nastier he’d ever seen. Every one of them radiated danger. If these were the people that Waller wanted them to work with, Dean was pretty sure that he and Sam were unnecessary.

“Hey, sugar,” the woman sang out to Rick when she was in arm’s reach of him. She smiled brightly, cocking her head and looking Sam up and down. “Who’s this tall drink of water?”

Sam shifted uncomfortably. “Sam Winchester,” he said, not offering his hand to shake.

She didn’t seem bothered. “You're uncomfortable, is who you are. I’m Harley Quinn,” she said with a laugh.

“And I’m guessing you’re the new members Rick was talking about,” the black man said.

Dean sized the guy up. He was actually a little taller than Dean. The way he was looking at things said there was a hell of a lot going on behind those dark eyes, like he was analyzing everything in the same way that Cas did. It was mental speed that Dean literally couldn’t comprehend. Dean held out his hand. “Dean Winchester,” he said.

“Floyd Lawton,” the other man said, shaking Dean’s hand warily. “Deadshot.”

“So you like guns,” Dean drawled.

Lawton smiled slightly, but it was a cold smile. “I’m a pretty good shot,” he said.

Dean shrugged. “Lots of people are good shots,” he said. Lawton’s eyes narrowed.

“You ain’t seen nothin’ until you’ve seen Floyd shoot,” the big guy said.

“This is Waylon,” Harley said cheerfully, grabbing the guy’s hand and pulling him forward as if she were oblivious to the tension building between Dean and Lawton. “They call him Killer Croc.”

Waylon grinned. With all those teeth, his mouth looked like a damn vampire’s. “Hi,” he said.

“Hey,” Dean said, for lack of anything better to say.

“These introductions are nice and all, but are we ever gonna actually do anything?” the white guy asked. He sounded Australian, to Dean’s surprise.

Rick shook his head. “No call for a mission today,” he said. “Just getting to know the Winchesters.”

“Great,” Lawton said. “And what are they gonna do?”

“I’ve seen their file,” Rick said. “Trust me, they’re gonna be helpful. We could have used them back in Midway.”

The tattooed guy rolled his eyes. “I thought we did just fine,” he said, voice heavily laced with sarcasm. “I mean, no one got blown up or anything.”

“Still sore about that, Chato?” the Australian dude said jovially, throwing an arm over the tattooed guy’s shoulders.

“Anyway,” Rick said, and damn if he didn’t sound like an exhausted parent.

“We won’t slow you down, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Dean said to Lawton. “We can hold our own. Sam and I have done a lot.”

Lawton folded his arms. “I bet,” he said, in a tone that indicated that he didn’t believe a word of it.

“Ignore him, Dean,” Sam said, grabbing Dean’s shoulder as Dean took a step forward. “He doesn’t have to believe it.”

Dean shook Sam’s hand off, but didn’t press the issue. “Whatever,” he muttered, and turned to look at Rick. “Do we just go back to our cells then, or what?”

“Try ‘or what’,” Rick said, with a weary and slightly forced grin. “Director Waller wants you all to see one another’s capabilities in advance of another mission.”

“Oh, yay,” the tattooed guy—Chato, apparently—said. “This is going to be so much fun.”

***

“Show and tell, basically,” Boomerang told them. “Like we’re fuckin’ kindergarteners.”

“Great,” Dean said, leaning against a wall and watching as a crew set up what looked like an obstacle course across the yard. Harley was stretching, and even if it seemed like she was deliberately putting on some kind of show it also seemed like she was seriously limbering up.

Sam raised his eyebrows. “They’re going to want us to show off what we can do?”

“Yeah,” Boomerang said. Dean winced. He hadn’t had a chance to practice anything recently, and this was going to really suck.

Just then, Harley called out, “Hey, boys! Aren’t you gonna watch?”

Dean turned to look. She wasn’t even looking at them. Instead, she was dropping the shirt of her prison uniform onto the ground, leaving her wearing just her bra and underwear. Harley cracked her neck, laughed, and took a running start forward.

For a second, Dean thought she wouldn’t clear the first obstacle, but then she jumped, and it was like time actually slowed down. Harley didn’t just jump, she flipped over the beam like it wasn’t even there. Her leap was so far that she cleared the second obstacle too, not even her hair brushing it. She tumbled under the next one, and vaulted the one after that. There was a set of hanging rings, and Harley swung from them with Cirque du Soleil grace. It was an impossible display of acrobatic perfection and by the time that Harley landed, sticking the landing on the far end of the mat with an Olympic gymnast’s pose, Dean was pretty sure his jaw was actually on the ground.

“Holy shit,” Sam said.

“She’s pretty good,” Boomerang said with a grin.

Rick traipsed to the end of the obstacle course and shoved Harley’s clothes into her arms. “Please get dressed,” he said, and turned to the rest of the group. “Lawton, front and center.”

The same crew that had set up Harley’s obstacle course dismantled it in a matter of minutes, replacing it with a shooting range and a table full of guns of every shape and kind. Lawton looked totally relaxed as he went up to the table and carefully checked the first gun he picked up. He glanced over his shoulder with a smirk. “Watch and learn,” he said, and without looking back at the target fired a bullet directly through the target’s “head”.

It was, frankly, an impressive display, even if Dean didn’t want to be impressed. Lawton never missed a shot, no matter the weapon in his hands. But he made sure not to be openly awed and when Lawton dropped the last gun back on the table and turned around, eyebrows raised, Dean stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Not half bad,” he said.

“Fuck you, Winchester,” Lawton said.

Rick stepped in between Dean and Lawton before Dean could make a single move. “Not right now,” he said to Lawton. “Seriously. This is a long goddamn day, can you cut me a fucking break?”

“Whatever, Flag.” Lawton went and stood beside Harley, pointedly ignoring Dean. Dean was fine with that.

Rubbing the back of his head, Rick turned and looked at Killer Croc. “Just…do your thing.”

“With pleasure,” the big dude said, and took off his jacket, folding it up with great care and passing it to Chato. He stretched his arms and his joints popped. Dean had about half a second to wonder what he was going to do, and then he just charged right at a large truck parked on the other side of the shooting range. It looked like the car was down for maintenance, and it would be down for just a little while longer. Waylon hit the car, grabbed it by the front bumper, and with a mighty roar lifted the car off the ground and over his head.

“Son of a bitch,” Dean said.

“I love watching him work,” Harley said contemplatively, resting her head on Lawton’s shoulder.

When Waylon dropped the car, the concrete yard shook. He turned around, grinning ferociously and shaking himself. “Feels good!” he said. “Lawton! Hit me!”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rick said when Lawton looked at him expectantly. He pulled his gun out and handed it to Lawton. “Why are all of you such exhibitionists?”

“Comes with the territory, doll,” Harley said, taking a step back so that Lawton could aim.

“Are you seriously going to shoot him?” Sam asked.

“Yep,” Lawton said, and pulled the trigger.

Dean wasn’t surprised when every one of the seventeen shots hit Waylon dead on, but he was surprised that the big man just roared with laughter. “I’m bulletproof,” he said, coming back to rejoin the group. “Comes in handy sometimes.”

“Here,” Chato said, passing Waylon his jacket. “Guess it’s my turn.”

“Not yet,” Rick said. “We’re saving the best for last. Harkness?”

Boomerang grinned and stepped forward. “Got something special for me, Colonel?”

Rick sighed and handed a pair of boomerangs, sharp and shiny, to him. “Go wild.”

And he did. Dean had to admit, again, to being pretty damn impressed. Boomerang’s trick-shot performance was the kind of thing normally reserved for high-class circuses. He sliced the hair off a guard, threw a boomerang within an inch of Sam’s nose, and whipped one shot up at a bird flying overhead and brought it down, all without breaking a sweat. At the end, he took a bow, but only Harley clapped for him.

“Go for it, Santana,” Rick said.

The tattooed man sighed and walked into the middle of the yard. “You’re going to want to step back,” he warned, and when Dean noticed that Harley had indeed skipped backward several yards he quickly followed suit.

For a second, Chato was totally still, staring at his hands. Dean saw a weird glow around them, as if…his hands were on fire.

And then he exploded into motion, fire spinning around him like he was an actual dragon. Sam gasped and Dean swore, but he couldn’t hear what he said over the roar of the flames. The heat was horrifying. Dean’s skin felt like it was just going to melt straight off. And the fire was greedy, seeming like it would suck in all the air from the prison yard. Shapes flickered and danced in the flames—birds, serpents, skulls—as if they were alive.

Just as suddenly as it began, the performance ended. Chato let the fires die and stood there, panting, every eye on him. “Need more?” he asked in a shaky voice after a minute of dead silence.

“Just sit the fuck down, man,” Rick said, expression tight with worry.

“He doesn’t do that often,” Boomerang explained in an undertone. “Doesn’t like making a scene or anything.”

“I can see why,” Sam muttered. He was fidgeting with his sleeves and suddenly Dean had a horrible feeling of foreboding.

Waylon pulled off his jacket and, folding it into a square, handed it to Chato. “Seriously, sit down, man,” he said.

“Thanks,” Chato muttered, taking the jacket and sitting down on it, knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around them.

“Okay, so since Katana’s not here, next on our list is Dean,” Rick said, looking at Dean. “I’m not sure what Waller wants you to demonstrate, exactly. She just said you’re ‘very competent’.”

Dean swallowed, a phantom pain burning on his arm. He zeroed in on the pain, embraced it, remembered the hunger and the rage and everything that had driven him to kill. He wasn’t going to fuck this up, not now. “I need a knife,” he said. “And you’re gonna want your best men down here.”

Rick’s eyes widened, almost imperceptibly, but Dean saw it. Even if the Mark was gone and had been for more than a year, it still felt like it was there, on his arm, demanding more and more from him even though it should have been removed. A curse like that didn’t just leave. He had felt it before, and now was the moment to embrace it. “Don’t kill anybody,” Rick said.

“I’ll do my best,” Dean said, holding out his hand.

After a moment’s hesitation, Rick dropped his Ka-Bar knife into Dean’s hand. “Seriously, don’t kill anybody,” he repeated.

Dean closed his hand around the hilt. It wasn’t the First Blade, but it would work. He didn’t answer, turning around and walking into the middle of the yard as Rick called for eight or ten volunteers to come fight.

“Dean, don’t kill anyone,” Sam said in an echo of Rick, concern lacing his voice.

And Dean didn’t answer. He didn’t trust his voice not to betray him. He knew, deep down in his bones, that he could kill every person in this prison yard if he really wanted to. The Mark of Cain—Amara—they still had a hold on him. There was a connection there, even if Rowena had erased the mark itself from Dean’s arm and Amara had let him go. The power was still there, but dormant. He’d kept it in check for the last year, doing everything he could to resist the impulses that demanded he simply kill and kill and kill until the hunger of the Darkness was finally sated. Now…this was what Waller wanted, wasn’t it? She wanted him reckless. Wanted him murderous.

He was pretty sure she was watching. He’d give her what she wanted.

Footsteps pounded toward him. Dean flexed his hand around the knife and stood waiting for the exact moment to move.

Someone’s hand landed on his shoulder. That was his cue. He turned fast and drove the knife right toward the attacker’s fucking eye.

It was a blur of blood and violence. Instinct moved him, almost as if someone else was guiding his hands. Dean gave himself up, gave up control of himself to whatever it was that demanded more blood and more pain. At some point he’d started grinning and he couldn’t bring himself to stop. Maybe he was even laughing, he didn’t know. Or maybe his face was frozen, locked in a grimace of rage. It wasn’t like Dean was paying attention: the sensation of bodies falling under his hands was too strong.

He shivered back to awareness to the sound of moans of pain. The knife was still in his hand and nine bodies were strewn around him, all alive, but obviously in horrible agony. His hands, he noticed in detachment, were bloody, too, and none of it appeared to be his. Dean looked around at the bodies, and then up at the rest of the squad. Sam, Lawton, Chato, and Rick were staring in horror at him. Waylon was apparently unmoved by the carnage. Boomerang looked disgusted. And Harley looked thoughtful.

“That what you wanted?” Dean asked, voice rough. He tossed the knife, flipping it in an easy arc through the air to Rick, who caught it.

“You’re fucking sick, man,” Lawton said. “And I say that as a damn killer for hire.”

Dean shrugged. “I didn’t kill them,” he said, and stepped over one of the bodies, wiping his hands on those stupid prison uniform pants.

Rick shook himself. “Well, at least we know what you can do,” he said, in a tone that meant he really wished he didn’t know. “Which means you’re up, Sam.”

“I’d rather not,” Sam said quietly.

“The rest of us have all shown off,” Chato said. “Get moving.”

Sam looked down. “Okay,” he said. “Should I wait until…um…”

“Oh,” Rick said. “Right. Medical will be here in a minute to clean up.”

There was an uncomfortable waiting period. As Dean came down from the high of the fight, he felt slightly guilty. Those guys were just doing their jobs. They hadn’t asked for Dean to hurt them like that. On the other hand, he knew that it could have been much, much worse, and at least he’d been able to maintain a little bit of control.

Finally, when everyone had been loaded up and taken to be examined and looked after, Sam went into the middle of the yard. As he passed Dean, he rolled up his sleeves, and Dean saw what looked like needle marks running all the way up his forearms, from wrist to elbow. Dean made some kind of a noise of horror, but Sam didn’t look at Dean once. He just gave Rick half a glance. “Am I good?” he asked flatly, hands at his sides.

“Go ahead,” Rick said.

Sam faced the truck that Waylon had earlier totaled. Dean felt sick to his stomach. He had a bad feeling he knew what was coming. “Sam, don’t!” he shouted.

But Sam ignored Dean and held out his hands. His shoulders were shaking as if with exertion, and a second later the truck began to rise into the air.

“Holy fucking hell,” Lawton said, eyes wide.

The truck just kept rising. Even at this distance, Dean could see the veins and tendons standing out in Sam’s arms as he pulled the truck higher and higher. Everyone was openly staring, even Rick, who presumably knew in advance what Sam was going to do.

Suddenly, Sam’s control broke. The truck fell, smashing into the ground with a massive creaking crunch. Sam’s knees buckled and he went over hard, crashing onto his side on the concrete.

Dean ran to his brother’s side, dropping to his knees next to Sam’s prone form. “Sam,” he said, gripping Sam’s shoulder. “Hey. Can you hear me?”

Sam’s nose was bleeding profusely. “’m sorry,” Sam slurred, looking up at Dean blearily. He held up one shaking arm so that Dean could clearly see the dozens of needle marks etched on it like an awful tattoo. “Couldn’t stop them…”

“What the fuck, Flag?” Chato demanded. At some point, the squad had closed in, standing around Sam and Dean. “You pump him up on drugs or some shit? That’s low, even by your standards.”

“Not drugs, demon blood,” Dean snarled, climbing to his feet. Right then, he was ready to kill Rick Flag, and everyone knew it. “He fucking got over that and you sons of bitches just decided—”

Harley grabbed Dean’s arm. “Don’t kill him, we need him,” she said. Dean looked down at her, about ready to throw a punch, but paused when he saw her scowling at Rick. “Also, they might blow you up if you kill him, so save it for later.”

“Yeah,” Waylon rumbled, folding his arms. “Makes you wonder what they’d do to the rest of us to make sure we’re a good investment.”

Boomerang helped Sam up. Sam’s arm was over the Australian’s shoulders, and even though he was sagging badly Boomerang didn’t look like he was going to let Sam fall. “Fuck this hellhole,” Boomerang said with venom.

Rick held up his hands defensively. “I didn’t have any say in this,” he said softly. “Trust me, I’d have stopped them if I could.”

“He’s right,” Lawton said, sounding tired. “I trust him that far.”

Dean was shaking. Harley’s hand slipped down from his upper arm to hold his, and she squeezed his hand tightly. “They aren’t going to stop,” she said, looking up at Dean. “They never do. Best we can do is make sure we don’t make shit worse for him.”

Unable to find words, Dean nodded at Harley. With Lawton standing in front of him, Waylon at his back, and Harley holding his hand fiercely, and Boomerang and Chato holding up his brother, Dean felt strangely like he might actually be a part of this weird-ass team.

Chapter Text

The group’s dynamics were set by that first day. Whatever tensions there might have been were significantly less important than the fact that all seven of them were under constant threat from the guards at Belle Reve and the operators of Task Force X. Dean and Floyd were in a sort of constant competition, but Harley decided to cheerfully ignore them and their alpha-male bullshit.

It wasn’t that difficult. She was too busy enjoying her espresso machine and romance novels and figuring out what to do with the expanded team to worry about Dean and Floyd. The team as a whole was more cohesive now than they had been back in Midway, definitely. There had only been two missions since Midway, but that was fine. They got time weekly to “bond” as a team, which apparently psychologists said would help make them more effective.

Harley had great affection for all the boys. If Waylon had anger issues, well, they weren’t as bad as Mister J’s. Chato was quiet, and his sarcasm wasn’t as biting as the sarcasm she was used to. Digger was usually an asshole, but he was a funny asshole, and he’d never laid a hand on Harley. She liked Dean, though he was angry all the time and even kind of bitchy. Sam was a nice guy, very quiet, even if he was always kind of rubbing at his arms like they hurt.

And Floyd…well. She really hated when people touched her, but for some reason she never really minded when Floyd did. He helped her up when she got knocked down, pulled her into helicopters when they were getting airlifted out of a mission zone, and once even gave her a half-hug despite not being a hugging kind of guy. He was awkward and dorky when he wasn’t on a mission and hot as hell when he was, and if Harley was honest with herself she was more than a little in love with him. But she didn’t say anything to anyone, because that was a surefire way to get herself chucked in isolation for a month.

Team bonding usually consisted of a deck of playing cards that someone had altered to be “Cards Against Humanity”, which was technically banned, but they’d written their own ridiculous fill-in-the blanks or answers on the fronts of each card. Games were a trip and a half, but at least they were fun and original. If they weren’t doing that, they were occasionally allowed to watch pre-approved movies. And if that failed, then Rick would just let them go nuts sparring with each other.

Harley pretended not to notice how eagerly people lined up to watch her practice. Her favorite partner was, perhaps oddly, Waylon—but then again maybe it wasn’t odd. Even though the boys had all seen her in action and knew what she could do, they still acted like she’d break if they dared to hit her the wrong way. Waylon didn’t give half a fuck about any of that and would throw her into walls and try to punch her lights out like she was a regular opponent. It was nice. And after the match was over, he’d help her into her jacket just as if she were a nice girl and not Harley Quinn.

It was hard, sometimes, to remember that she’d been a psychiatrist before she’d become what she was now. But watching the Winchesters was an interesting exercise. If they’d come into Arkham Asylum while she was still employed there, Harley thought that they would have been an interesting case study on lots of different things.

Dean, she thought, had adapted quickly to life in Belle Reve. He gave just the right amount of resistance and capitulation in the face of power-hungry guards. He shut up when Rick gave orders, but never kissed up to him. If someone went to punch him, chances were he’d already assessed the situation and decided whether or not it was worth punching them back.

Sam, on the other hand, wasn’t adapting at all, and Harley knew it wasn’t his fault. Every time they saw him, he was more distracted, more prone to irritation and even outright anger. He was like the addicts who’d always hung around the Joker. Harley was familiar with the look, and the fact that Waller thought it was okay to keep Sam high on whatever drug that “demon blood” was made her furious. She said as much to Floyd once, out of earshot of the rest of the team, and he just shrugged.

“Not like we can do anything,” he said. “We’re just lucky none of the rest of us is like that.”

After that conversation, Harley decided not to try to change things. If they argued with Waller, they might lose what little bit of freedom they had, and none of them knew Sam well enough to want to risk that for him. No matter how much Harley liked him, she liked privacy and Floyd much more.

***

It had been about two months since the Winchesters had joined Task Force X, and they finally were going on a mission all together.

“I’m so excited!” Harley bubbled. Through her external excitement, she watched the rest of the team keenly as they prepared. They were all arming up in the same locker room, under the heaviest of guards. She already had her shit together, and so did Waylon, Sam, and Chato. They were just shooting the shit while Dean, Floyd, and Digger got their stuff in place.

“It’s just gonna be the same thing on a different day,” Chato pointed out. “Go in, fight some metahuman who got cocky, and fly right the fuck back here.”

“I’m taking you all to a bar afterwards,” Rick pointed out.

Harley laughed and popped her bubble gum loudly. “Which makes up for all the rest of the shit you put us through, don’t it, boys?”

“Yeah, dollface,” Digger said, standing up from lacing his boots with a grin. “Ain’t nobody who mixes drinks like you.”

“Can’t wait to actually get some alcohol,” Dean said dryly. He checked his sidearm one last time, straightened out his jacket, and ran a hand through his hair. “How long has it been since we’ve had a drink, Sam?”

Sam shrugged. “At least three months,” he said. “Maybe more. What’s the date?”

“Like hell I know,” Rick said. “Can we hurry this up? This isn’t exactly DEFCON One here, but we’re still on a tight schedule.”

Floyd was putting the finishing touches on his getup. Six firearms were no joke. He was just now picking up his AR-15. “Cool your jets, Flag,” he said, sighting down the barrel. Harley got the usual little tingle watching the way he handled the weapon. She briefly allowed herself to fantasize about his hands all over her like they were all over that gun. But then he lowered the weapon and the fantasy was over. He looked up at Rick with a grin. “You want us going fast or going prepared?”

Rick rolled his eyes. “Fucking whatever,” he said. “I’ve seen you go both ways, Lawton. Let’s get our asses on that plane.”

***

They headed northwest from Louisiana, flying fast. Dean wasn’t sure exactly where they were, but it wasn’t like they were heading into no-man’s-land or empty territory. He saw cities and roads below them, the Missouri River winding across the landscape and cutting the flyover states into pieces.

“You ready, Sam?” he asked when no one was listening.

“As I’ll ever be,” Sam said. He looked down at his hands. “It’s so weird, going on something like this blind. I don’t even know what we’re hunting.”

Dean leaned his head back and rested it against the metal wall of the plane. It jostled a bit with the turbulence, but he ignored it. “I know what you mean. ’s weird.”

Sam shifted in his seat. His heavy, military-issue gear scraped against the restraints. They’d both been given outfits like Rick and the rest of the special ops guys wore, which was weird enough on its own. No comfortable clothes for this one. Dean did have to give the boots credit, though: they fit really nice. “I just wish we hadn’t been so stupid.”

“We didn’t know we were gonna end up here,” Dean pointed out.

“And now I’m higher than the fucking Rocky Mountains on demon blood,” Sam said, voice harsh with frustration.

Dean put a hand on Sam’s knee. For the first time in like two weeks, Sam was startled into looking Dean in the eye. “I don’t blame you,” Dean said steadily. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Okay, Dean,” Sam said, sounding tired.

Rick banged on the ceiling. “Hey, listen up!” he said. The team didn’t exactly jump to attention, but they did look up. Rick, despite the turbulence, stood stock-still in the middle of the plane. “We’re going into an unknown situation. We’ve never faced a metahuman quite like this, and Director Waller would like the Winchesters to take the lead on this situation.”

Alarmed, Dean stared at Rick. “What the fuck you getting us into, Flag?”

“According to our intel, we’re confronting something that’s right out of your wheelhouse,” Rick said. “Apparently, we’re going to fight an angel.”

“Oh, shit,” Sam muttered.

Boomerang cackled. “An angel? That’s rich!”

“You’re flying in a plane with a reincarnated Aztec god,” Chato pointed out. “And we literally met fighting an ancient death goddess. I’ll buy an angel any day.”

Rick cleared his throat. “Our goal isn’t to kill this thing. Director Waller wants us to bring it in alive and kicking. So stay nonlethal. And be careful with your fires, Diablo, we’re also supposed to protect any other assets. The Director didn’t specify what those assets are, but we can assume they’re flammable, I guess.” Rick looked at Sam and Dean. “Anything you want to inform us of?”

“Stay clear of the hands,” Dean said, trying to remember all the shit he’d ever seen an angel actually do. “Angels can smite you. Insta-kill. They can also wipe your memory.”

“They’re not invulnerable, but short of actually knocking the possessing angel out of the host vessel, you aren’t going to be able to really do much,” Sam added.

Dean chewed the inside of his lip. “And stay out of the way of their angel blade. Shit hurts.”

Sam looked at Dean. “We forgetting anything?”

Dean resisted the urge to cackle as loudly as Boomerang had a minute ago. “Oh, and if we jack this up? The angel will teleport out of there and disappear. We’ll lose them for good.”

“Is there anything this fuckin’ angel can’t do?” Lawton demanded.

“If I manage to pin it down with an Enochian ward, it won’t be able to run away,” Sam said, lifting one shoulder in half a shrug. “And then it can be restrained. Pretty sure even angelic strength won’t be able to stop Waylon.”

“What’s Enochian?” Harley asked.

Dean grinned. “The language of angels,” he said.

***

They landed in an airfield somewhere in the middle of Kansas and Dean started to have a bad feeling about this.

They took a car, driving out into an even-more-rural part of Kansas and Dean’s bad feeling turned into a worse feeling.

The cars pulled up in front of a hill below a bridge with a door in the side and Dean’s worse feeling turned into something that almost made him physically ill.

“Dean,” Sam whispered urgently, grabbing him before he could get out of the car, “are we seriously about to go after Cas?”

“It’s a capture mission,” Dean said grimly. “At least he’ll be alive. Fuck up the ward and he can run, right?”

"I can't screw up the ward," Sam muttered. "What if it isn't him? It might be some other angel."

Dean opened his mouth to reply, but Rick cut him off. “Hurry up!” he shouted, and Dean had no choice but to get out of the car.

“There’s a door around back,” Sam said to Rick as Dean came up to them.

Rick squinted at him. “…why do you know that?”

Sam leveled a glare at him. “We fucking live here,” he snarled. “So trust me: there’s a back door, and no one will expect us to go through that.”

“You live here?” Lawton asked. “What kind of mess is this?”

“Waller’s mess,” Harley suggested, slinging her baseball bat casually over her shoulder. “Does she ever actually tell us anything?”

“We should get a move on,” Waylon said.

Dean pushed down the feeling of nausea. “I know what assets Waller was talking about,” he volunteered. “There’s a lot of books in here, information she probably wants. Flammable as all hell.”

“In that case, I’m going to stay in the back,” Chato said, drifting around the edges of the group.

“Good idea,” Rick said. He looked at a younger guy who was hovering by his shoulder. “Edwards, you take Sam, Harkness and your team around the back. I’ve got the rest through the front.”

Dean tried to tell Sam with a look to not let Cas get shot, but he wasn’t sure if Sam was even seeing him anymore. Hell, he wasn’t sure if Sam was seeing anything. He had no idea how much demon blood they’d given Sam before this, but it looked like Sam was slipping out of reality just a little.

If they got out of this alive, Dean was going to kill Amanda Waller.

He didn’t have a lot of time to contemplate revenge, because Rick was already ordering Waylon to break down the door. Dean flinched when Waylon’s powerful fist crashed into the door and sent it flying inwards off its hinges.

Lawton led the way in with Harley and Dean close on his heels. The Bunker was silent, and though it wasn’t unusual Dean could kind of tell that it was silence from neglect and abandonment rather than silence from their usual quiet life. It smelled like dust, and for the first time in his life Dean understood what it felt like to come home after a long absence.

“Jesus, Winchester, you live here?” Lawton asked, breaking the silence as he surveyed the map room and the library from the balcony.

Harley swung easily over the railing and slid down one of the supports. “Is that a telescope?”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Sam and I have never been able to figure out how to make it work.”

“Please focus,” Rick said, still with that tired parent voice. “We’re here to find the angel, not act like wannabe astronauts.”

From the other side of the Bunker, Dean heard gunshots and shouting. “Fuck!” He shoved past Lawton, ignoring Rick’s shouts to ‘stop’ and ‘wait’, and bolted down the stairs and down the hall. Heels clattered on the concrete floor behind him and he knew Harley was in hot pursuit, and judging by the sounds of the chaos in the map room the rest of Rick’s team was also trying to figure out how to follow him. Dean ignored it all in favor of sprinting as fast as he could toward Cas. If someone actually hurt Cas before Dean got there…

He burst into the garage and right into the line of fire. Edwards’ team had come in the garage doors and apparently immediately started firing at Cas, who was on the ground, having taken cover behind one of the cars. Sam was being forcibly restrained and there were bullet holes everywhere.

“Hold your fire!” Edwards yelped, shock written all over his face.

Dean just kept ignoring the people yelling at him to get out of the way. He didn’t break his stride, running across the garage. “Cas!” he shouted.

Cas looked up, and despite the fucked situation his eyes widened and a smile broke across his face. “Dean!”

And then Dean was next to Cas, throwing aside the rifle he’d been given and told to use, and Cas had practically buried Dean in a tight, reassuring hug, and it was all Dean could do not to cry like a baby. He forced himself to stay calm and took a shuddering breath, arms full of angel. “Fuck, it’s good to see you,” he said into Cas’s coat.

“I thought you were dead,” Cas said, pulling back to look Dean over with a worried expression.

“Can’t get rid of me that easily,” Dean said with a choked laugh. He was unwilling to take his hands off of Cas, because if he did he was scared that the angel would disappear.

Dean became aware that Sam was yelling at people. It was the scary kind of yelling, the kind that meant Sam was about to start breaking things, and two seconds later Sam slid over the hood of the car to crash on the ground next to Dean and Cas. Cas let go of Dean in favor of tackling Sam in a hug, and Dean tried not to feel disappointed.

In order to give Sam and Cas their moment, Dean got to his feet and looked at the rest of the team. Harley was laughing at something, Chato was watching their little reunion speculatively, and Rick was tearing Edwards a new one for shooting to kill while the other three looked on.

“What’s going on?” Cas asked, getting to his feet. His coat, Dean noticed, had bullet holes in it, and there were bloodstains. “Who are all these people?”

“Task Force X,” Rick said, turning away from a shamefaced Edwards and striding over to Dean, Sam, and Cas. He pulled something out of his pocket as he went, and Dean found himself stepping in front of Cas protectively as he realized that Rick was holding handcuffs.

Sam’s face dropped into a set expression. “No,” he said flatly. “Enochian handcuffs—”

“—are what I’m supposed to put on the angel for transport,” Rick said.

“You wanna put those on him, you go through both of us,” Dean said.

He heard Lawton clear his throat. “Everything okay over there?”

“Darlin’, I think we have a problem,” Harley said to Floyd. Her eyes flashed, flickering from Dean to Rick to Cas to Sam. “If you missed it, they don’t want Angel Boy over there to get thrown in with us.”

“Which means they’re smart,” Chato pointed out. “I’m in favor of letting him go.”

Cas’s voice was low, pitched so that Dean guessed he and Sam would be the only ones to actually hear it. “I can’t teleport. There’s some kind of ward on the building.”

“Fuck,” Sam whispered. “I knew I shouldn’t have drawn that.”

Rick looked tenser by the second. “Get out of the way,” he said. “We’re transporting the asset—”

“His name is Castiel,” Dean snapped out, and somehow that simple sentence made the tension in the room so much worse.

“You need to move,” Rick said.

Dean didn’t answer, he just glared. He was still very aware that there were guns pointed at him, but he didn’t care. Right now, he’d take every bullet in the room if it meant stopping them from getting near Cas.

Rick’s free hand slid into his pocket and came out holding a tiny remote with button. Oh, right, there were nanite bombs in their necks that would kill them. “Move,” he said heavily.

Dean didn’t move an inch, and neither did Sam.

And that was when Lawton raised his gun. “Put down the motherfucking detonator or I’ll put a bullet in your skull,” he said.

“Okay, thanks for defending us, but what the fuck are you doing? Thought you hated us,” Dean said tersely, after a long moment of silence.

“If he’ll pull that detonator over something like this, what the fuck will make him pull it on the rest of us?” Lawton asked, without taking his eyes off Rick.

Rick looked at Lawton. “Thought you trusted me,” he said.

“Up until you pulled out that fucking detonator, so did I,” Lawton said steadily. “What other promises you gone back on, Flag? How’s Zoe doing?”

“Who the hell is Zoe?” Dean muttered to Sam. Sam shrugged and didn’t look away from Rick.

Boomerang’s eyes narrowed. “Fair point,” he said. “You’re crazy if you think we’re just gonna ignore the fact that you just went back on a promise like that.”

“I have my orders,” Rick said.

“So we can’t trust anybody. Like that’s new,” Harley said. She tossed her hair. “Why are we so worried about all this?”

“Dean,” Cas said, distracting him from Waylon’s reply. “I should just go quietly.”

“Like hell,” Dean said.

Sam glanced down. “You don’t know what they’ll do to you,” he said.

Cas pushed in between Dean and Sam, holding his arms out to Rick. “I don’t care,” he said. “I’m sure I’ve endured worse.”

Dean grabbed at Cas’s shoulder, but Rick had already seized his opportunity. The handcuffs clicked shut around Cas’s wrists, glowed for a brief moment, and then looked normal again. Cas tested the cuffs, and the whole room relaxed as he couldn’t break them.

“Get him to the plane,” Rick said brusquely, and two big guys came and grabbed Cas by the upper arms, pulling him roughly toward the garage door. Cas looked over his shoulder once, apologetically, at Dean, and then he vanished out the door.

Chapter Text

In her large cell, Harley sipped at her espresso thoughtfully and watched the guards congregating around the door. She guessed that they were gossiping about the angel again. He was the only topic of conversation around here lately. Harley hadn’t gotten another chance to talk to him, which was unfortunate. And she hadn’t seen anyone from the rest of the team in a week and a half. They hadn’t had their weekly “team bonding” get-together, either. Harley missed her boys. Especially Floyd.

She closed her eyes, savoring the coffee, and leaned her head back against the bars, relaxing. Oh, well. They’d let them do something soon enough, if only to get them to burn off energy and stave off thoughts of escape.

A few minutes passed before there was a commotion in the hallway. Harley cracked open one eye, just enough to see through her lashes as the Warden marched through the door with his usual crew of thugs in tow.

“Quinn!” he bellowed.

Harley yawned and stretched theatrically. “Hey,” she said, masking her fear of the man with a slightly wild grin. “Whatcha want?”

The Warden stepped aside to let the thugs open the door, holding stun batons and riot shields at the ready. As if Harley was stupid enough to hit them right now. “Director Waller wants to see you,” he said with a scowl. “So come quietly.”

“I don’t, usually,” Harley said with a lewd wink. Some of the thugs looked uncomfortable.

“Fuckin’…whatever. Just handcuff her and get her moving,” the Warden said, wincing.

Harley smirked and let them put handcuffs on her without too much fuss. She let the thugs take her up to Waller’s office and sat demurely in the chair.

Director Waller came in shortly after Harley arrived. “Miss Quinn,” she said.

“Hi, Director,” Harley said. “Have a seat, why dontcha?”

“All right,” Waller said, and sat down across the desk. “Do you know why I’ve asked to see you?”

“Well, you don’t ask to see me enough,” Harley pouted.

Waller’s expression didn’t change. “I wanted to talk to you about your last mission,” she said.

Harley crossed her legs, mind already racing. What was Waller going to go on about? “Okay,” she said easily. “Go for it.”

“Don’t try to dissemble,” Waller warned. “I’m well aware that you’re smarter than you’d have all of us believe. You see more than most of your teammates, which is the only thing that makes you an asset and not a liability.”

“Aw, you’ll make me blush, sugar,” Harley purred. That comment of Waller’s was a lie and they both knew it, but the rules of their particular game meant that Waller had to say things like that. And Harley had to laugh about them and snipe back in whatever way she could.

The director ignored the comment. “What happened in the garage of the Bunker?” Waller asked.

“Well, Dean-o ran off first,” Harley said, pursing her lips and thinking back. “I followed him, ’cause it seemed like a bad idea for him to go off alone, y’know? So when I got to the garage, Dean was in some kind of standoff with Rick over this angel guy. And, like, I wasn’t going to get in the middle of it? But then Rick got all twitchy and pulled out the detonator for the nanite bombs, and Floyd might have pulled a gun on him, and it turned into like a five-way standoff…”

“That correlates with what everyone else has reported,” Waller said. She watched Harley carefully through hooded eyes. “And—what side did you take in that standoff, Miss Quinn?”

Harley laughed. “I didn’t take a side,” she said. “I mean, if push comes to shove, I’m siding with whoever has the detonator in their hand. I like life.” That was all a lie, and they both knew it, but the rule of the game was that Waller didn’t push the issue. Harley wouldn’t side with Rick, she’d side with Floyd, because she didn’t actually care about living.

“Very well,” Waller said.

“Can I go now? I was in the middle of morning coffee,” Harley said.

Waller’s mouth edged into something that might be charitably called a smile. “Not quite yet,” she said. “There’s something else we need to discuss.”

Harley slumped in her chair, mind whirling despite the outward appearance of boredom. What the fuck else would Waller have to talk to her about? “Yeah?” she said, drawing out the word.

The question Waller asked was unexpected, to say the least. “Do you trust your new teammates?” she asked.

“Huh?” Harley arched an eyebrow. “What kind of question is that, Mandy?”

“A very serious one,” Waller said. Her expression didn’t change. “I’ll ask again. Do you trust your new teammates?”

Harley chewed the inside of her cheek, thinking. That was actually a difficult question to answer. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I do.”

Waller folded her arms. “Why?”

“Because they hate you,” Harley said with a grin.

“Really?”

Harley laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “Really. Hating you is kinda how the rest of us learned to get along, remember? The Winchesters fit right in.”

***

It was only five days later that Harley got woken up by someone banging on the bars of her cell.

“What’s going on?” she asked, not bothering to open her eyes.

“Quinn! Get the fuck up, you’re on call!” the Warden snapped.

Harley sat up from her cot, cracking the kinks out of her spine. “For what?” she asked, unable to hide the irritation. “If you’re just yanking my chain again—”

“I’m not,” the Warden said, and that was when Harley noticed that his face looked grey. The man was…what, was he scared? Ha fucking ha, what a riot that was. “You need to get up.”

She stared at him for a moment. “…cool,” she said, swinging her legs off the cot. “Someone wanna open the locker room so I can get dressed?”

They rushed Harley through getting dressed, and she tried not to show how spooked she was. The guards were weirdly quiet and almost distracted. It was freaky. She just got into her gear and got to the briefing room, where everyone else was waiting.

“Hey,” she said as she came in. “What’s with the rush? I need my beauty sleep, you know.”

The angel was sitting at the table, face contorted with pain, hands pressed to the sides of his head as if trying to block out noise none of them could hear. Dean was crouched beside the angel’s chair, a hand on his shoulder, saying something Harley couldn’t hear. Floyd and Rick were having some kind of conference together, while the rest of the boys stood around and watched, looking way more worried than they should be.

“Apparently we went and grabbed the angel for a reason,” Digger explained as Harley went to stand with him, since Floyd was kind of ignoring her. “He knows something about what’s going on.”

“Which is…?” Harley asked, holding out one hand for an explanation.

Chato shook his head and shuddered. “Sky went dark while Waylon and I were out in the yard,” he said. “Just. Pitch fuckin’ black, like last year when we were fighting the Enchantress, only worse.”

“And then the locusts came,” Waylon said, and his voice sounded like something straight up out of the Apocalypse. “Everywhere. Eating everything that wasn’t made of metal or concrete.”

“I watched a guard get eaten in front of my eyes,” Chato said, looking haunted. Harley curled her lip in disgust. Well, that was fucking horrific.

Waylon crossed his arms. “We only got inside ’cause Chato torched half the swarm,” he said.

“Oh, shit,” Harley said.

Rick rapped on the table. “Hey. Bring it in,” he said.

Harley turned and went to stand next to Floyd. He looked cold, not like he was angry, but like he was trying not to be scared. “Has Rick explained anything?” she asked in an undertone.

“He’s explained enough,” Floyd said, and then shut his mouth tight.

“Castiel. You got anything new?” Rick asked, leaned on the table and watching the angel.

With apparent effort, he raised his head from his hands. “No,” he said. “It’s just…chaos.”

“We’ve gotta do something,” Dean said.

Harley made a face at him. “None of you has explained what’s going on yet,” she said.

“Heaven is screaming,” Castiel said.

“Okay,” Rick said. “What we need to know is why the fuck this is happening. Communication networks across the globe are going down. There are reports of freak weather…fucking everywhere. I think that there are random volcanoes blowing up? I don’t know.”

Sam laughed dryly. “Wow, this is worse than the actual apocalypse was supposed to be,” he said.

“I guess so,” Rick said. “So here’s the thing. Things get worse the closer you get to the center of the whole mess, which appears to be a small town somewhere in Nebraska.”

“Of course it’s Nebraska,” Waylon said. “Whole state’s a horror movie.”

“Huh?” Chato asked, looking up at Waylon.

Waylon rolled his eyes. “You ever seen Jeepers Creepers?”

“Okay, focus!” Rick snapped. “We’re going to the town. Only objective is to destroy whatever’s causing all of this.”

“It’s the Nephilim,” Castiel growled.

Harley leaned forward, around Floyd, and stared at the angel. “Come again?” she asked.

“The child of a fallen angel and a human woman,” Sam said. “Described in the Bible only as ‘mighty’. Apocryphal at best, but like every other fucking thing out there, actually real.”

“So we’re going to destroy the Nephilim,” Rick said, forging forward despite the interruptions. “It won’t be easy.”

Floyd laughed. “When is it ever?” he asked.

“About collateral damage…?” Digger asked, flipping his boomerang casually.

Rick shrugged. “At this point, we’re fairly sure the town’s already in ruins and everyone inside it is dead,” he said. “Collateral damage isn’t even on the radar.”

“Great,” Harley said with a bright grin. She flipped her baseball bat from one hand to the other, feeling the electric charge of anticipation of the looming fight. “So this is the end of the world. Where do we start?”

As it turned out, they started just like usual, getting on a big C-17 plane that would fly them to the epicenter of the destruction. Harley stuck close to Floyd as they boarded the plane. The sky looked like it was boiling. It wasn’t quite as bad as the Enchantress’s shtick, but it was nasty enough. And unlike the last time they’d gone on a mission this big, Harley thought that she was actually nervous. She hadn’t cared, last time, whether she lived or died but now something was different.

She sat curled up next to Floyd in the rocking plane that felt like it was going to fall out of the sky at any moment and watched the rest of the team. Katana was silent, sitting alone and apparently meditating. Rick was talking to Edwards, nervously twisting the wedding ring on his finger. Digger was polishing his boomerangs, one by one, with his stuffed pink unicorn sitting on his lap. Waylon looked like he was sleeping, unless you caught the glint of light on his half-closed eyes. Chato was praying in silence, hands folded and eyes closed. Sam had a folder open on his lap, rereading what information they had about the Nephilim. Dean was sitting beside Castiel, and Harley recognized with a slight pang of familiarity the way he was sitting, angling at the angel but not quite able to touch. It was like watching the way she always ended up sitting next to Floyd.

“You, uh, you okay?” Floyd asked suddenly, glancing at her out of the corner of his eyes.

Harley forced a smile. “Why wouldn’t I be?” she fired back, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “I’m always fine, sweetheart.”

Floyd just looked at her. “You don’t look fine to me,” he said.

“You don’t look so hot yourself,” Harley said back.

“Might be the end of the world. You expect me to look like a fuckin’ Disney prince?” Floyd folded his arms with a frustrated sigh and leaned back against the side of the plane.

Harley batted her eyelashes at him. “You always look like a Disney prince to me,” she said. She noticed that everyone else was pointedly looking away from their quiet conversation, giving them what limited privacy there was on the cramped plane. Never let it be said that these idiots had no sense of tact.

“Quit flirting unless you’re gonna do something about it,” Floyd muttered.

“Don’t have time to do much,” Harley said, scooting slightly closer.

Floyd looked at her. “You better hurry up, then,” he said with a faint grin.

Harley leaned in close and, still feeling super fucking tentative about this whole thing, kissed Floyd. It wasn’t like fireworks went off or anything; there were enough explosions outside to account for that. He didn’t sweep her passionately into his arms, just took her hand and held it.

And then the plane hit a patch of turbulence and they were jostled apart. Harley found that she was breathing surprisingly hard for such a small kiss, and she didn’t mind.

“Hurried up enough for you?” she asked after a second.

“Yeah,” Floyd said. He squeezed her hand. “If we get time later…”

Harley closed the gap between them and put her head on his shoulder. “We can take our time later,” she said.

What went unsaid was, of course, that there might not be a later. And with a small shock Harley realized that this was why this mission felt so different than the last one, why it felt so much more important and dangerous. On this mission, there was really a chance that people could get killed. And it wasn’t like before, where she hadn’t known them and hadn’t cared. She did know them and she did care. If they died, it would hurt. They were her friends. Her family.

And if this Nephilim thing wanted to hurt them, it was going to have to go through her first.

***

The plane touched down in a blasted field outside of town. Rick and his squad of soldiers were first off the plane, with Dean and Lawton not far behind. They came out into a world scorched down to bare, blackened earth. There was a road, cracked and broken, lined with burned-out hulks of cars. From horizon to horizon, the sky was clear—except, far down the road, the low silhouette of a town.

“This is fuckin’ weird,” Lawton muttered.

“Got that right,” Dean replied as he surveyed the landscape. Nothing moved, not even smoke. It felt like they were standing an oven, but there weren’t even heat waves coming off the road. He felt like the world had broken.

Harley, heels clicking on the asphalt, stepped delicately around them, looking around critically. “I think this is a bigger problem than you told us, Ricky boy,” she said.

Rick sighed, somehow still managing to sound exhausted even as he looked around keenly, waiting for the moment to shoot. “I did my best,” he said. “Come on. We’re losing time.”

The group strung out along the road. Dean felt the crackle of tension in the air as he swept his gaze across the road, between the empty cars, waiting for something to move. Sam, pacing along steadily at his side, was inhumanly still. They’d charged him up on God only knew how much demon blood, and it made Dean sick even now. But at least it was Sam, the person he trusted more than anyone else, walking beside him into the town.

They paused before entering the town. “Harkness?” Rick said, turning to Boomerang.

“Way ahead of you,” Boomerang said with a grin. He flipped a boomerang out, one that was fitted with a camera, and sent it flying down the street into the town. “Gather ’round, everybody.”

Dean leaned in close to the little screen that Boomerang pulled out his pocket, watching the view the camera gave them as it hurtled down the street. The buildings were, surprisingly, still standing, though they’d all been burned out. There was still nothing moving anywhere, nothing green, nothing alive.

“Is it even here?” Chato asked.

“We need to check anyway,” Rick said. “Because—”

At that moment, the camera feed exploded into static. Boomerang shook the screen, poked at a few buttons, and nothing happened.

“Something destroyed the camera,” he said eventually, tucking the screen away again.

“It’s here,” Waylon said, nodding. “Cool.”

Rick straightened up. “The plan is for Diablo, Croc, Sam, and Castiel to confront the Nephilim directly,” he said. “The rest of us will play cover fire or hold off any of its reinforcements, if it has them.”

“Why can’t we take a crack at the Nephilim, exactly?” Harley asked, one hand on her hip.

“Because we're pretty sure it’ll just kill any of the rest of us,” Rick said grimly. “Best we can do is get back and let our best firepower take their shot. You four, lead the way in.”

Chato’s eyes narrowed. “If I have to blow myself up again…” he muttered, but headed for the town anyway.

Before they could get too far ahead, Dean grabbed Sam and Cas by the shoulders. “Hang on,” he said, and dragged Sam into a tight hug. “Don’t get yourself killed.”

Sam’s hand briefly came up to Dean’s shoulder. “I won’t,” he mumbled into Dean’s shirt. “I mean, I’ll do my best.”

Dean let go of Sam, swallowing all the things he should have said because there just wasn’t time to actually say them now, and turned to face Cas. It was so weird, seeing him out of the tan trench coat and blue tie. He was dressed like Dean and Sam and Rick, in body armor and black fatigues, with his angel blade out in his hand.

“Dean,” Cas said helplessly.

“You don’t get yourself killed, either,” Dean said, planting his hands on Cas’s shoulders and willing the damn angel to actually listen to him for once. “Please, Cas.”

Cas stepped forward and embraced Dean. “I’ll be careful,” he said softly. “But even if we fail, promise me you’ll try to walk away from this.”

“I…you know I can’t promise that,” Dean said. He didn’t want to walk away, not if Cas and Sam didn’t survive.

At that, Cas took a step back. The space was back, the distance between them damn near impossible to cross, and now maybe Dean would never have a chance to try. No one was getting a happy ending here, but at least Harley had the fucking chance with Lawton. “Then I’ll survive,” Cas said simply. “We walk out of this together, or we don’t walk away at all.”

“Hey!” Rick called, and the three of them looked at him. They’d fallen a bit behind, and the colonel was watching them with an inscrutable expression. “Keep up.”

Glass crunched under Dean’s feet as he caught up to Lawton. Sam and Cas hurried ahead to join Waylon and Chato at the front of the group, leading them into the burned town. He forced himself to think about what was ahead, about the Nephilim and the hundreds of ways this could go wrong, instead of thinking about Cas and Sam and how much he wished he’d done more, said more, before they got this far.

“Good luck with him,” Lawton said after a few moments of silence.

“Huh?” Dean asked, casting Lawton a surprised glance.

The gunman didn’t look at Dean. “Good luck with the angel,” he said. “You two couldn’t be more obvious if you tried.”

Dean went back to staring at the road ahead. “…thanks,” he muttered.

There was a brief pause before they crossed into the town proper, and when they did things went really, really weird. For a second, the world went white, and there was a popping sound, and when Dean’s vision came back there was no way they were in the same place they’d been in before.

Waylon voiced everyone’s thoughts. “Where the fuck are we?”

***

It actually looked normal, and that was the scariest part. Dean blinked around at the town, bright in the sunlight with a beautiful blue sky overhead, people strolling on the sidewalks, children playing in the lush green gardens, dogs napping under shady trees, and thought that he must have just died.

“Are the rest of you seeing this?” Chato asked, staring around with wide and slightly wild eyes.

“If you’re seeing shit that doesn’t exist? Yeah,” Harley said, bouncing her baseball bat on her shoulder and staring.

Rick turned to Cas. “What the hell is going on?”

Cas looked as confused as everyone else. “I have no idea,” he said. “The Nephilim are powerful enough, and one that is a child of Lucifer himself might well have the power to warp the reality we experience. It may have created this as an illusion. But I’m just taking shots in the dark here.”

“It makes sense to me,” Sam said, folding his arms. “Look at them all. None of them even see us.”

Dean scanned the people of the town. Not one of them acknowledged the presence of what was basically a SWAT team plus a giant crocodile-man.

“Fuckin…dryer settings again,” Harley said, with a hysterical laugh. “This is rich.”

“Real funny,” Lawton agreed. He was still holding his gun like he was ready to fire. “So this Nephilim is fucking with our heads. Great.”

“Plan doesn’t change,” Rick said. “We find the Nephilim and kill it.”

“Best plan I’ve heard all week,” Boomerang said, flipping his boomerang.

Cas pointed down the street. “I can sense the presence of the Nephilim,” he said with absolutely unnatural calm. “We need to keep moving.”

“Fan out,” Rick directed. “You other four, cover the Dream Team up front. You’re our next best line of defense if they go down.”

Dean glanced at Harley. If there was anyone on this team that he actually really liked, it was Harley. “Ready?” he asked.

She grinned at him. “As I’ll ever be, darlin’,” she said.

They advanced down the street, unnoticed by anyone in the surreal Norman Rockwell town surrounding them. It was still hot and still, and that was all that kept Dean from just sliding into believing that this whole illusion was real. The engines of the cars didn’t make noise. The laughter of the people on the sidewalks was faint and distant. It wasn’t real, and once he was looking for it Dean could see right through it. This wasn’t like the illusion of a djinn. There was no effort to make this feel real. His feet were still kicking up ash and sending glass shards skittering. He was still holding his gun.

It took several paranoid minutes, but finally they were in the dead center of what would have been Main Street. There was a group of children playing on the corner and for some reason when he saw them Dean’s neck prickled. One of them looked up, and for the first time since they’d come into this illusory reality someone noticed them. The kid, Dean noticed, looked like a much younger version of that woman—what was her name, Kelly?—who they had helped when they were exorcising the President.

“Stand back,” Cas said, holding out his arm to stay the rest of the group. “That’s it.”

“Shit,” Lawton muttered, raising his gun slightly in preparation. The nice thing about Lawton was that the whole ‘never point your gun unless you’re ready to shoot it’ thing always applied, because he was always ready to shoot. Dean could appreciate that in a man.

The kid walked away from the other children, out into the middle of the street. She was maybe five or six years old, with big eyes and hair pulled up into a Cindy Lou Who ponytail. But something about the eyes made Dean flinch and want to run.

“Hi,” she said, waving at them. “You’re here for me, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Cas said, staring down at her. “You’re an abomination.”

“She’s a kid,” Boomerang muttered.

Dean shot a glare at the Australian. “Shit’s not what it looks like,” he said.

“The Marked Man is right,” the little girl said calmly, watching the entire group with her little hands folded neatly behind her back. She rocked back and forth as she spoke, a disarmingly childlike gesture that was belied only by her words. “I am the child of the Morning Star, the offspring of a Son of God and a daughter of man, born to be the Evening Star. I am the Nephilim you seek.”

Cas raised the angel blade. “For the safety of the world, we have to end you,” he said frankly.

“Wait,” the Nephilim said. She tilted her head, dark curls as bouncy as Harley’s. “Don’t you want to hear my offer?”

“What offer?” Waylon asked, peering down at her from his great height. It was a kinda funny picture, when Dean thought about it. Four grown men, in a standoff with a six-year-old child. How she was six years old, Dean didn’t know, but he assumed it was just supernaturally speedy aging.

The Nephilim held out her arms. “Stay here,” she said. “Live in this world I have created. Be safe, happy, fulfilled. Be as your heart desires. Love. Be normal.”

Dean was half hypnotized by what she was saying. It sounded good. Let it all go. Be free from Belle Reve, this whole mess of Task Force X. Live with Sam and Cas and be happy, for once in his goddamn failure of a life.

“Only serve me,” the Nephilim went on, and Dean found himself nodding in agreement, “and you need not fear the fires of purification that I have sent forth to scour my world.”

“Fuck that,” Chato said sharply, and his voice broke the spell that the Nephilim’s lilting voice had started to cast. “Someone else already tried that trick. Didn’t work then, won’t work now.”

“Yeah,” Harley said, stepping up beside him, baseball bat ready to swing. “Normal doesn’t fucking exist. Not for us.”

Lawton pushed in between Sam and Waylon. “If I’m gonna get all that, I’m gonna get it on my own,” he said. “I don’t need your help.”

Sam laughed. “Do you know how hard I’ve tried to be normal? It’s just not worth it.”

Waylon joined in Sam’s laugh with a dark chuckle of his own. “What they said,” he said.

Boomerang strolled up to stand next to Cas. “Yeah, think I’ll pass, sweetheart,” he drawled. “I don’t need dreams.”

Dean joined the line. He was almost face to face with the Nephilim, shoulder to shoulder with Cas and Sam. “We don’t need this shit,” he said. “I’ve got the people I need.”

“Very well,” the Nephilim said calmly. She smiled sweetly. The heat grew more intense and the image of the town around them shivered like a mirage. “Your deaths will not be pretty.”

And the world flickered and burned.

Chapter Text

They were back in the middle of the burned town, amid the half-collapsed structures under the boiling sky. And the Nephilim was still there in front of them, but horribly changed.

It was taller than Waylon now, with skin that glowed an eerie silver-white, like the negative of a shadow. Its feet floated several inches off the ground and its four long arms were stretched wide, as though it was being crucified. Its body was androgynous and perfectly formed, stunningly beautiful, except for its head. The face was empty, not even blank, but empty, like a hole in reality. As though the spot where its face should have been opened into a black hole.

this is the truth

Harley felt the voice more than she heard it, sending shockwaves through her bones and driving her to her knees. She heard, distantly, someone screaming. It might have been her. There was blood on her hands, dripping thick from her nose and mouth. The air was choking out of her lungs and she felt like she was going to suffocate.

I am the truth

With effort, Harley looked around. Lawton, Dean, Boomerang, Rick, and the rest of the more ordinary humans had also fallen to the ground. Dean was on his side in a fetal position, Lawton’s hands were over his ears, Boomerang was clutching his face and screaming. Waylon, Sam, and Chato were standing, though it looked like it was almost impossible, and Castiel seemed virtually unaffected.

the Flood was sent to destroy my kind, for it is we who are the inheritors of the earth

Someone had to do something, but Harley could barely move her head, let alone get to her feet and pick up her bat or pull out her gun. But wasn’t this why Waller had filled Sam up with demon blood and made him so powerful? “Sam,” Harley croaked, spitting blood as she spoke. “Stop…it…”

He definitely heard her, even through the subsonic roar of the Nephilim’s voice. Shaking with the effort, Sam raised his open hand like he was pushing through molasses.

but I am more powerful than my predecessors, for I am the child of Lucifer, the most powerful of all the angels, and I will not be contained by a mere Flood

The Nephilim was rising. It had been mere inches into the air and now it was over Harley’s head where she knelt on the ground. Lightning raged through the clouds, not touching the ground yet, and it seemed like the air itself would ignite around them. Sam’s face was going white with effort, blood running from his nose and down his face, dripping off his chin to fall in slow motion to splash and sizzle away on the ground. But he held his hand steady, and Harley saw his eyes go black.

I am greater than the Apocalypse, for when my work is complete there will be no God and no Heaven

“Shut…up…” Sam snarled, and closed his hand.

The pressure broke.

The Nephilim screamed and wow, that hurt like a bitch, but Harley could breathe again and it didn’t feel like her eyes were bleeding anymore. She scooped up her bat and scrambled to her feet, wobbly but upright. Rick was rasping out orders but Harley didn’t hear them, too busy watching the impossible sight of the Nephilim before her.

“Get back,” Castiel ordered her, stepping between her and the levitating Nephilim. “We’ll handle this from here.”

“Hostiles! Open fire!” Rick shouted.

“Harley!” Floyd shouted, and Harley spun around.

And hell if there weren’t hostiles. It looked like every person who had lived in this town had risen up as a staggering, shambling, burned skeleton with white, evil light blazing from its eyesockets and pulsing in its ribcage.

“This, I can do!” Digger said, flinging a boomerang past Harley.

Harley laughed and wiped the blood off her face with her sleeve. “Yeah,” she said, hefting the bat, “we can definitely do this!” And she sprinted forward into the thick of the skeleton army.

It was a storm of bullets and freezing white fire. Harley was shocked that none of the bullets actually managed to hit her, despite the fact that she ran right into the line of fire more than once. The burned skeletons shattered easily under Harley’s blows, collapsing into heaps of ash. She found herself back to back with Dean once, smashing skeletons with him, and thought that it was kind of fun. She didn’t know where Katana had gone off to and didn’t care at all.

She ducked under a bony arm and drove her bat into the spine of the attacking skeleton, snapping it in half and sending the whole thing crashing to the ground. The ribs broke and the white light spilled out, but Harley paid it no mind, already kicking the head off the next skeleton in line. She followed the kick through and shattered the collarbone of another skeleton. Both went down in a heap of clattering bones and she laughed as she swung her bat at the next skeleton with its grasping phalanges.

It was a good fight. Harley lost herself in the flow of combat, never stopping long enough to catch her breath, just whaling on one skeleton after another. The whole fight lasted maybe three minutes, tops. Finally, the last skeleton collapsed. Between Harley and Dean’s melee rampage, Digger’s explosives, and the hail of bullets from Floyd, Rick, and the rest, it was easy enough to dispatch most of them. Harley stopped to breathe and heard the roar behind her of the Nephilim and of Chato’s fire.

That was when Floyd grabbed her arm. “We’re out,” he said tersely.

“What?” she asked, looking up at him in confusion.

“Rick wants us to get out of here,” Floyd said, already pulling her down the street. “We’re gonna regroup somewhere else, patch ourselves up, you know.”

Harley looked over her shoulder. Waylon had just taken a hit and gone flying, crashing onto the ground and leaping up again, shaking himself off. Chato was sending blast after blast of fire at the Nephilim, spinning around it as it hurled beams of that same white light at him. Sam, despite the blood dripping down his face and the tremors in his hands, had psychically pinned it in place, preventing it from engaging them directly. Castiel was trying to get close, through whatever magical barrier it had erected, shouting spells in Enochian that kinda hurt Harley’s ears to hear. “What about them?” she asked, nearly tripping over a piece of rubble.

“They’ll follow us,” Floyd said. “Just come on.”

And that was when Harley planted her feet and refused to move. “No,” she said. “We’re not leaving them, Floyd.”

“Harley…” Floyd said, shaking his head in exasperation.

“Save the domestic for later,” Digger called as he went by. Harley saw a nasty bruise on his face.

Harley didn’t budge. “Are you really gonna run from this?” she demanded. “Just ’cause Rick’s a fuckin’ coward doesn’t mean we have to be!”

Dean hesitated as he passed them. “Harley, we’ve got to go.”

She saw him look back, over his shoulder at their teammates, and chased the fleeting moment of uncertainty, doing what she did best, tearing into him with words. “You really gonna leave your brother here alone? Your angel? Come on, Dean!”

Floyd pulled on her arm. “Just leave!” he pleaded. Harley wrenched her arm away from him.

“No, she’s right,” Dean said. He backed up, standing next to Harley. “We shouldn’t.”

“Fuck,” Digger muttered, slowing down and coming back to them. “I can’t just run off and leave all of you assholes to die alone.”

“Besides, Floyd, where else are we going to go?” Harley demanded. “The whole world is like this now! We can’t escape or retreat! It’s everywhere!”

He rubbed a hand over his face and nodded. Exhaustion was showing through the ‘Deadshot’ face he usually wore on missions. “Okay, Harley,” Floyd said. “I’m with you.”

Rick stopped, a mixed expression on his face. He came back to them, Katana staying where she was and watching him. His face was still bloody, and Harley saw a crack in his wedding ring. She wondered vaguely where June Moon was, where Zoe was, if they were both safe. “You aren’t retreating,” Rick said. It wasn’t a question.

“We aren’t running away,” Harley said. “If the others fail, we’re the only ones who have half a chance to stop the Nephilim.”

“Altruism now?” Rick laughed bitterly. “Took fucking Armageddon to do it.”

Harley laughed right back. “It’s not altruism,” she said grimly. “If those guys die, I plan on going down with them.”

“They call us Suicide Squad for a reason,” Floyd said with a dark grin. His teeth were still bloody, but Harley felt the sudden urge to kiss him.

“Okay,” Rick said. He nodded. “Go. We’ll meet you back where the plane dropped us when it’s over.” He didn’t have to say what they’d do if it wasn’t over. They all knew where this was going.

Harley flipped Rick an ironic salute. “Yes, sir,” she said, and then Rick was running off after the rest of his squad, out of the burned town and down the road.

“Let’s do this,” Floyd said.

Together, they turned and started back into the fight.

***

When they turned their attention back to the fight, it was clear that the Nephilim had the upper hand. Waylon was in an unmoving pile at the foot of a wall, Chato and Castiel looked exhausted, and Sam was on his knees in front of the Nephilim.

you cannot win

“Fuck,” Dean said, holding up his gun and taking aim at the thing’s empty face, “that.”

And he pulled the trigger.

The roar of the gunshot echoed across the battlefield. The bullet hurtled forward and Dean saw Lawton’s eyes tracing its trajectory with superhuman speed and he knew it was going to hit, square in the face, and then—

—the bullet disappeared.

your weapons cannot harm me

“We have a problem,” Lawton said, but still lifted up his gun and took aim at the Nephilim’s torso. “Winchester, you’re gonna have to get close.”

“Race me,” Harley said with a brilliant, suicidally happy grin, and then she was off, gymnast’s legs eating up the distance. She leaped, surging into the air, almost defying gravity, and at the peak of her arc she swung her baseball bat directly at the Nephilim.

It snatched her out of the sky.

The bat went flying as Harley jerked to a halt, momentum arrested in midair. The Nephilim had her by the throat, one huge hand choking the life out of her as she struggled, clawing futilely at it.

“Harley!” Lawton shouted. The barrel of his rifle swung up as he took aim at the Nephilim’s arm. He fired, and Dean knew that there was no way in hell that Deadshot of all people could miss.

But the bullet went wide.

It curved around the Nephilim, like it was orbiting the monster, and spun back to them. It landed with a small thud at Lawton’s feet.

Dean burst into a run, drawing his knife as he went. He didn’t bother shouting, except for yelling Cas’s name. The angel turned and nodded, and crouched down, holding out his hands. Without slowing down, Dean stepped onto Cas’s hands and let the angel push him upwards, right at the Nephilim.

Time seemed to slow down. Dean heard nothing but his own harsh breathing and saw nothing but the Nephilim’s arms reaching for him. He ducked his head and the Nephilim missed its grab and Dean crashed into the arm holding Harley above the ground. He drove his knife deep—deep into the shoulder, and it didn’t bounce off.

The Nephilim let out a scream of pain and Dean thought he’d gone deaf. But it dropped Harley. He saw her dragging herself out of the way, but that was all he got.

you dare much

It moved, faster now than Dean could avoid, grabbing him with all four arms and driving him down. He slammed into the ground, all the breath in his body blasted out of him, and, dizzy, he could only watch as the Nephilim leaned over him with its empty face.

die screaming

And Dean felt himself drawn towards the emptiness of the Nephilim. His whole body was stretching, bones like elastic, pulled into the Nephilim’s lightless maw. He was screaming, but there was no sound except the humming howl of whatever lurked beyond the emptiness.

A voice like thunder roared out across the battlefield. Something hit Dean and the Nephilim and threw them both back. Dean went flying, out of the Nephilim’s grasp and away from the irresistible pull of its emptiness. Dean’s body was on fire in unbelievable agony as all his bones snapped back into place, but he managed to look up.

A titanic, skeletal form, ablaze in golden fire, was facing down the Nephilim.

Lawton appeared in Dean’s field of view, dragging him away from the combat.

“What the fuck is that?” Dean rasped, staring at the fight.

“Chato,” Lawton said, setting Dean down out of the immediate danger zone. “He…has a fuckton of power. Doesn’t use it much, but when he does…”

Sam and Harley, dragging Waylon, dropped down next to Dean and Lawton. Harley’s makeup was streaked with tears, there was a bruise growing around her neck. and when she got close enough, Lawton wordlessly pulled her into a tight, protective hug.

Dean managed to get slightly more upright. Everything hurt, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. “We’ve gotta help him,” he said. “Sam—”

“We can’t,” Sam said dully. There was dried blood, his own blood, all over the front of his shirt from the nosebleed he’d given himself. His hands were trembling. “I’m out of juice. There’s nothing else I can do. I held it down for a long time, but…”

Boomerang crept out from behind a house. “We done for?” he asked. The pink unicorn, Dean noticed, was covered in ash.

Chato roared, driving his fist into the center of the Nephilim’s chest and laying it out flat. But it moved, fast as an insect, between his legs to surge up behind him.

this is a good fight

Four arms grabbed hold of Chato and lifted him from the ground and into the air.

but it’s over now

The Nephilim barely took any effort at all as it gripped Chato’s arms and ripped both of them off, throwing them aside like kindling. The fiery figure, still held in the air, roared in pain, twisting and struggling, trying to get free.

“We’re done for,” Lawton said. He shook his head, running a hand through Harley’s hair.

Across the street, Dean saw a flash of movement and his heart leaped. “We’re not done for quite yet,” he said softly.

Cas walked out of a burned building and into the street, right at the Nephilim.

***

Harley looked up from where her face was buried in Floyd’s shoulder as Dean clambered to his feet. “What’s goin’ on?” she asked. Dean just pointed, and Harley looked.

Castiel was out in the middle of the road, angel blade in his hands. “Abomination!” he shouted, and his voice rang like a bell off the buildings.

The Nephilim turned, still holding Chato off the ground effortlessly as he struggled.

face me on our terms, angel

“The Nephilim are always weaker than an angel’s true form,” Castiel said. Harley saw him look at Dean, and his face twisted in pain. “I won’t be held back by a vessel.”

In its bizarre, bone-shaking voice, the Nephilim laughed.

then discard it, and fight me

Castiel inclined his head. “Close your eyes,” he said to everyone.

“Do it!” Dean shouted, turning around and covering his eyes with his hands.

Harley didn’t know what she was expecting, but she definitely didn’t expect the angel to explode.

There was a blinding flash of blue-white light and a sound like huge bells ringing. Harley slammed her eyes shut and twisted to bury her face in Floyd’s chest. The world was nothing but sound and the earth itself was shaking like it would crack apart. It went on and on and on and seemed like it would never end. It felt like she was going to explode like Castiel had.

Gradually, Harley became aware of the things happening around them. It wasn’t just noisy chaos, it was the sounds of a fight. There was a back-and-forth, like they were actually trading blows, actually fighting. Harley could hear voices, impossibly loud and impossibly deep, registering in some part of her brain that didn’t know what to do with the information.

And then, with a sound that shook the planet, it was over.

The silence was so loud that at first Harley didn’t realize it had ended. But then she felt the soul-deep ache from the holy light fade, and looked up carefully at the world around them. The first thing she noticed was that the clouds, previously black and menacing, were already dissipating, rain sifting down gently on the burned and bloody town. It felt good, and Harley turned her face to the sky for a second to enjoy the feeling. Then she looked around and realized that, where there had been burned-but-still-standing buildings, there was now only flat ground for miles around. Everything—cars, buildings, bodies—except for Task Force X was gone.

Dean was already running out to the middle of the road, where three bodies were lying. Harley climbed to her feet and, hand in hand with Floyd, followed.

“I’ll just—stay here then,” Digger said after them, still sitting by the unconscious Waylon and the catatonic Sam.

“You do that,” Floyd said. For the first time ever, his rifle was just hanging loosely from the hand that wasn’t holding Harley’s.

It seemed that Dean was handling Castiel just fine on his own, so Harley and Floyd went right to Chato. Or, well, Floyd did; Harley wanted to see the other body.

The Nephilim’s body was that of a small child again, not the black-hole-headed nightmare it had been just moments before. Harley looked down at it and even though it was a child she didn’t feel an ounce of pity or sadness.

She kicked it lightly with the toe of her shoe. Its arm flopped limply, and then its eyes fluttered open. It looked up at her pleadingly. “Please…” it said.

“We can’t all have what we want, sugar,” Harley said coldly, crouching down next to it. She got out her gun, which she hadn’t used once in the fight so far, and methodically loaded it.

Its eyes flashed empty. “I—”

The Nephilim never got to finish its sentence. Harley pressed her gun to the Nephilim’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

“What was that?” Floyd asked.

Harley stood up and put the gun away. The barrel was still hot. “Just cleaning up the last of the mess,” she said, and went to kneel next to Chato. “Is he alive?”

Floyd was checking for a pulse. “Barely,” he said. “But yeah.”

“I watched his arms get ripped off,” Harley said, poking at Chato’s bicep. “How the fuck does he still have both?”

“Do you really think I have any fucking idea,” Floyd said. Harley couldn’t help a hysterical small laugh because this, this was what they were talking about when they’d just stopped the end of the world for the second time in their lives. She clapped her hands over her mouth, laughing so hard that her bruised throat and cracked ribs ached, unable to stop even when she thought she’d started crying instead. It hurt. It was also funny as hell.

Dean was shaking Castiel, just a little, but enough that it was easy to see that the angel wasn’t moving at all. “Cas,” he kept saying, over and over, “Cas…”

“Is he breathing?” Floyd asked.

“He doesn’t need to breathe,” Dean said, and holy shit he sounded crazier than Harley. “He’s an angel in a vessel. I don’t know how to tell if he’s alive.”

Harley picked up Chato’s limp hand, tracing the lines of his tattoos. They were pretty. She’d never studied them closely before. And it wasn’t like he was going to object, he’d offered a few times when Harley was staring to let her take a better look, but she’d always turned him down. “True love’s kiss?” she suggested idly.

Dean sounded like he was choking. “Now is not the time!”

“It’s as good as we’ve got,” Floyd said. “If he’s not waking up, we’ve got to get moving. How are we gonna carry everyone?”

In the end, they did manage to get Sam upright and walking, even if something was still clearly missing from his head and he was mostly asleep on his feet. Waylon woke up a little, enough to move, even though one of his eyes was swollen shut, one of his arms was broken, and he was limping on what was probably a broken leg. Floyd hoisted Chato up in a fireman’s carry, while Dean and Digger carried the unconscious-possibly-dead angel. Harley carried all the loose weapons and various bits of gear they’d dropped during the fight, which was in some ways more challenging than carrying a body. At least the bodies didn’t actively try to get away from their carriers.

The hike back to the rendezvous point was wet and muddy. Halfway there Harley took off her heels in disgust, preferring a barefoot walk over broken concrete and glass to breaking her ankle by stepping in the wrong pothole. The rain was still falling, more of a mist than a real rainstorm, but it was enough to plaster Harley’s hair to her face and her shirt to her skin. She couldn’t take a hand away from the pile of weapons and gear in her arms, though, and so by the time they got to the rendezvous point her hair was stringing down into her face and obscuring her vision.

“Here,” Waylon said, and without warning took all the weapons and gear from Harley.

She pushed her hair out of her face, slicking it back over her head and out of her eyes. “Thanks,” she said, looking up at Waylon. “But—your arm—”

“It don’t hurt,” Waylon said. He flexed lightly, wincing. “Not so much I can’t carry this shit.”

Harley smiled and leaned her head on his scaly arm. “You’re a gentleman.”

He chuckled. “Only sometimes.”

***

They waited in the rain for what felt like hours. The sun never quite came out, but that was all right, because Dean was pretty sure that the rain was cleaning up all the corruption of the Nephilim’s touch. He sat with Cas’s head in his lap, absently running his fingers through the angel’s hair. Sometimes, his eyelids would flutter like he was waking up, but he never actually did.

“You’re a fucking moron, you know that?” Lawton said, looking at Dean.

Dean smiled, tired. “I’ve been told,” he said. “There a point to that insult?”

“Yeah. You might be dumb, but you’re brave,” Lawton said.

Well, that was just warm and fuzzy. “For what it’s worth, I think your shooting is pretty damn impressive,” Dean said.

Lawton grinned and shook his head. “Will wonders never cease,” he said.

Harley ruffled Dean’s hair. “It’s that kind of day,” she said affectionately.

Where he was propped against Boomerang’s shoulder, Chato stirred. His eyes cracked open, bright in the middle of those eyesocket tattoos of his. “What’d I miss?” he slurred.

“The end of the world,” Harley said. “Again.”

“I don’t mind,” Chato said.

Dean rubbed his eyes with the hand not currently in Cas’s hair. “How many times is the whole fucking world going to end, exactly?”

“A lot,” Boomerang said. “You’ve done three, right?”

“Isn’t that classified information?” Dean asked.

Boomerang laughed mirthlessly. “I’m good at finding out stuff like that.”

“In other words,” Harley said, “Rick doesn’t know how to keep secrets.”

Finally, the sound of a helicopter’s blades roared out of the clouds overhead and a chopper descended, touching down on the shattered road. Rick climbed out, without his rifle, running to them with actual worry on his face.

Before he could say anything, Sam croaked out, “Is it over?”

Rick’s worry lines smoothed out. “Yeah,” he said. “The earthquakes, the fire tornadoes, the locusts and shit…it’s all stopped. The people who were sick are already getting better. Whatever you did, it worked.”

“We killed it,” Harley said.

“Good,” Rick said. “Come on. We’re getting you out of here before the rest of the world arrives.”

It was just Rick and a pilot in the helicopter, which Dean found really weird. The two men helped them load Cas, Sam (who was still barely on his feet), and Chato (who passed out the minute he tried to stand) into the helicopter. Waylon, though looking better by the minute, was limping, and Harley had twisted her ankle anticlimactically on the way to the rendezvous point. Dean and Boomerang were scratched up from the fight with the Nephilim’s minions and Lawton had somehow gotten a bad burn on his shoulder. Collectively, they were a mess, and no one was asking many questions.

The helicopter ride was quiet. Cas never stirred. Sam fell asleep against Dean’s shoulder. Harley and Lawton just leaned on each other and didn’t say a word. Rick stared out the window and didn’t talk. Dean thought that they were all in shock. Lucky for him, he’d done this one before. He was going to be all right after a beer and a good night’s sleep.

Dean must have fallen into some kind of stupor, because the landing took him by surprise. When the helicopter touched down, he jumped a little.

“Come on,” Rick said. He opened the door and got out of the helicopter.

There was a moment of dissonance, when Dean stepped out onto the ground. This wasn’t Belle Reve. The Louisiana heat didn’t smack him in the face as it should have. Instead, he smelled the dry dusty air of Kansas in the fall. And he saw the familiar road, and the hill and the bridge and the door that led into the Bunker.

“Why are we here?” he asked numbly, staring around in stunned shock.

“You aren’t going back to Belle Reve,” Rick said. “I’m not…I can’t send you back there.”

Harley squared off with him. By some miracle, she had energy left, and Dean was more than okay with leaving her to do the job of chewing Rick out. “Why now?” she snapped. “Aren’t you gonna give us some spiel about how we might kill people if we’re left to ourselves? What’s Waller gonna say when you come back without us?”

“I’ll be in trouble,” Rick said ruefully. “But…we’re facing pressure from certain parties to shut down Task Force X. And this is the perfect time for me to do it. Waller thinks—or, well, she will think—that you’re dead. That the Nephilim killed you.”

“How ’bout those bombs?” Lawton asked, eyebrows somewhere near his hairline.

Rick tossed the detonator on the ground and stepped on it, hard. It crunched pitifully under his boot. “I deactivated them,” he said.

“Well, shit,” Lawton said, and rubbed his eyes. “Shit, man, I really underestimated you.”

“I don’t think you’re all gonna keep killing people,” Rick said. “Dunno what in the fuck you will do, but it’s not gonna be murder.”

“Got that right,” Waylon said, scooping Chato out of the plane as if he weighed no more than a piece of paper. “I never murdered anyone in the first place.”

“Really?” Sam asked.

Waylon shrugged. “It was all self-defense,” he said. “I didn’t kill ’em for fun.”

Rick coughed. “Be that as it may,” he said, “don’t kill anybody now. Waller won’t look for you, not when the records show that you all died. And she’s probably going to end up in trouble, anyway. There are a lot of questions getting asked about Task Force X.”

“Who’s asking the questions?” Dean asked.

“I have a guess,” Harley muttered, with a faint smile. She twined her fingers in her hair, braiding it loosely and undoing it. “Does the name start with a ‘Bat’ and end with a ‘man’?”

Rick grinned a little. “Maybe,” he said. “I can’t say. But I can say that Director Waller is going to have a lot more problems than being suspicious about you.”

Dean held out his hand. “Thanks, man,” he said, as Rick shook. “We owe you one.”

“You and June ever need a favor, come find me,” Lawton said, shaking Rick’s hand as well.

Rick looked embarrassed. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “Seriously, though. Just don’t kill anyone.”

“Don’t think that’s a problem,” Sam said, swaying a little.

“Good luck,” Boomerang said simply.

And without any more words, Rick walked back to the helicopter, climbed inside, and flew away.

Dean shook himself, when the helicopter was out of sight. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get inside.”

Chapter Text

It was lucky that they had so many unused rooms in the Bunker, because everyone got their own space. Dean ran himself ragged finding blankets, pillows, and first-aid kits for their injured friends. Harley manned the coffee maker, and seemed to have some kind of supernatural sense for when somebody was going to need something to drink. There wasn’t really food, per se, and as the only virtually undamaged party Boomerang volunteered to take one of the cars into town and find something to eat. Waylon helped Dean move people and furniture. Lawton swept the Bunker for surveillance devices, destroying everything suspicious in sight.

When Sam, Cas, and Chato were in their rooms, safe and cleaned up, Dean finally relaxed a little bit. He, Harley, Lawton, and Waylon convened in the library.

“Digger back yet?” Lawton asked.

“No,” Harley said. She set a bottle of whiskey in the middle of the table, along with a stack of four tumblers. “Best I could do, boys.”

Waylon poured himself a glass of whiskey and drank it in one swallow. “Where do we go from here?” he asked.

“No idea,” Dean said, pulling the bottle across the table and dumping as much as he could into the glass. “Not one fucking clue.”

Lawton took the bottle right out of Dean’s hand. “Square one. We go from there,” he said, pouring himself a pretty generous helping. “So what’s square one?”

Harley dropped into the seat beside Lawton, took the bottle from him, and took a long drink straight out of it. “Square one: Waller thinks we’re dead and we just stopped the fucking apocalypse.”

“Square two: we’re safe, for now. Looks like the Bunker’s warding magic worked to keep the feds away,” Dean said. He gestured around at the nearly pristine library. “If they could’ve gotten in here, they would’ve. I don’t know how the magic works, exactly, but I bet it did work.”

Waylon leaned back, arms over his chest. “Square three. None of us has anywhere else to go.”

“Right,” Lawton said. “Square four: we’ve got injured people. And angels. Probably gonna want to do something about that.”

“Cas’ll wake up,” Dean said with an assurance he definitely didn’t feel. “And once Sam gets the demon blood out of his system, he’ll be fine, too.”

Harley nodded. “Chato just needs sleep,” she said.

Lawton took a sip from his glass. “Square five. I need to find out what happened to my daughter.”

“When the internet comes back, I bet Sam and I can find out about her,” Dean said.

“Square six: we need a plan,” Harley said. She turned to Dean. “What do you people do with this weird hidden nuclear bunker thing?”

“It’s our home base,” Dean said. “We…hunted monsters.”

Waylon chuckled. “Shit, man, I think that sounds fun,” he said. “Much better than hiding out in the Gotham sewers.”

Dean managed a smile. “It’s okay sometimes,” he said. “We’ve got the space. You all wanna stay until you figure your shit out, I’m sure Sam won’t say no.”

“Cool,” Harley said.

Lawton nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “’Least until tomorrow.”

“Great,” Dean said. He got up, knocking back the last of his whiskey. “I’m going to go check on Sam and Cas, make sure they’re still breathing.”

Across the table, Waylon raised his brows. “You wanna stay and wait for food?”

“See you all in the morning,” was all Dean said in response.

He heard all of them say goodnight as he went out of the room. Dean stopped in with Sam first, making sure that he was comfortable and sleeping. He was, though he was slightly feverish and that made Dean nervous. But it was probably the last of the demon blood burning out of his system, so Dean moved on to Cas’s room.

The angel, too, was at rest. Unlike Sam, Cas wasn’t feverish. Dean sat on the edge of the bed next to him and felt Cas’s forehead. Yeah: it was way too cold. And the vessel still wasn’t breathing.

“Shit, Cas,” Dean muttered, “at least I know Sam’s alive. Don’t be dead.”

He took Cas’s hand in his. He was unresponsive. It was so far from the blazing vitality that usually radiated from him. Carefully, as if the angel would shatter into pieces if Dean’s touch was too heavy, he bent and brushed the lightest possible kiss to Cas’s forehead. He closed his eyes, bowed his head, and silently prayed to anyone who was listening—Chuck, Amara, whoever, he didn’t care. Cas had to wake up. He had to be all right.

Later, Dean wasn’t sure how long he waited. He heard Waylon’s heavy footsteps go by and the sound of a door closing. The pipes rushed as someone turned on a shower. And then the bunker went quiet. Dean was still sitting there, and Cas was still not moving, and Dean was increasingly sure that Cas was dead. How long before the signs started setting in? How long before rigor mortis, before Cas’s vessel started to rot? Would it even do that, or would the effect of the angelic possession just be too strong?

“Dean?” Cas said.

“Oh, fuck,” Dean said, eyes flying wide as he whipped around to stare at Cas. The angel’s eyes were so damn blue. “You’re alive?”

Cas smiled slow and Dean thought his whole heart was just going to crack into pieces. “I think I am, yes,” he said. “The Nephilim was very strong. But it couldn’t quite kill me.”

“Good,” Dean said, and then didn’t say anything else. He thought he was crying. He held Cas’s hand tighter, feeling warmth and life flood through his best friend again, and promised himself that he would never let go again.

“Why are you crying?” Cas asked.

Dean wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “I’m not,” he said.

Cas’s eyes crinkled as his smile widened. “You don’t have to do that for me,” he said.

“I told you not to die,” Dean said. “You didn’t listen.”

“I did listen,” Cas said. He sat up slowly, wincing a little, and reached up to grip Dean’s shoulder for balance. “I’m still here. I’m not going to leave you, idiot.”

Dean had to dry off his face again, because he was still crying. “Don’t ever do that again,” he said.

“I promise,” Cas said, and then he leaned in and, very gently kissed Dean right on the mouth.

For a second, Dean was pretty sure his heart stopped. And then, when it restarted, he leaned forward and kissed Cas again.

***

Harley slowly stripped off her shoes and tossed them in the corner, looking around her room again. She was sitting on the bed, now barefoot, with one of Sam’s huge flannel shirts draped around her shoulders. It was fucking weird to have this, a bed and a nightstand and a door that locked. It was the kind of normal that she hadn’t had since…well, since before the Joker, anyway. Maybe longer. Her memories got a little bit fuzzy after a while.

Someone knocked on the door. “C’mon in,” Harley said, drawing her legs up onto the bed.

Floyd opened the door just a crack, looking in at her. “You mind if I take up the showers for a while?” he asked.

“Go ahead, sugar,” Harley said, giving him a small and genuine smile.

“Thanks,” he said, and stepped out again, closing the door gently behind him.

Harley’s heart thudded once, twice, three times, as an idea occurred to her. After a minute or two of hesitation, she slid barefoot off the bed, picked up the towel Dean had left on the nightstand, and walked out into the hall. The concrete floor was cold and the Bunker was silent as she padded through the winding corridors to the showers.

They were gym-style showers, just heads on the walls with knobs and drains, and benches and lockers on the far wall for keeping shit dry. Floyd was already standing under one, clothes and a pistol heaped on the bench behind him, and when Harley walked in he almost jumped out of his skin.

“Holy shit! What are you doing?” he demanded, staring at her.

Harley shrugged with a casualness she didn’t feel. “Taking a shower,” she said, and yanked her shirt off over her head. She didn’t look at him as she stripped off the rest of her clothes, leaving them carelessly on the floor. “Mind if I join you?”

“No, but…Harley,” Floyd said.

She took him at his word, stepping in close to him under the same showerhead. Harley was way too aware how close they were, but she tried to ignore it. This was what you did, right? You got close and he took it the rest of the way. “I’m down for anything,” she said, looking just to the side of his shoulder, pulse throbbing in her ears, louder than the sound of the water.

“Harley,” Floyd said again.

Moving ahead of her own thoughts, Harley reached out to brush her fingertips over Floyd’s bicep. “Betcha been wanting this for a while. I—”

He cut her off in midsentence, catching her wrist gently with one hand and then tangling his fingers with hers. “Harley,” he said. “Look at me.”

She looked up, blinking water out of her eyes. “What?”

“Not tonight,” Floyd said. “I do want you, I’d be a dumbass not to want you, but we’re not doing this now. Not like this.”

Harley was fully aware that she sounded like a little kid. “Really?” she asked in a small voice.

Floyd nodded. He brushed wet strands of hair off her face, tucking them behind her ear. “Yeah, really,” he said. “We just survived the fuckin’ apocalypse. I wanna shave, I wanna relax, I wanna sleep. We can do everything else later.”

“You sure about later? You’re not just blowin’ me off?” Harley asked.

“I’m sure,” Floyd said. He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Harley’s forehead. “You want some help washing your hair?”

Harley smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “You want some help shaving?”

Floyd grinned. “You’re the only one I’d trust near my neck with a razor,” he said.

The shower might have been the best damn shower Harley had ever taken. Her clothes, laying on the floor, were soaked by the time that they got done, but it didn’t matter. She and Floyd went back to his room together. While he got dressed and checked his weapons one last time, Harley threw on the oversized t-shirt she was wearing to sleep and brushed out her hair. When Floyd climbed into bed and killed the light, Harley curled up against his side with her head on his shoulder.

“What are we gonna do now?” he asked into the darkness.

“Whatever we want,” Harley replied.

And that, when she thought about it long after Floyd had fallen asleep, was really the thing. They could do whatever they wanted. Task Force X was dead. The world hadn’t ended. Harley was finally going to have the chance to do what she really wanted, whatever that ended up being. For now, at least, they were all really free.

***

“Hurry up, boys!” Harley shouted over her shoulder. She swept into the garage, surveying the gorgeous lines of Dean’s Chevy Impala. God, that was a nice car.

“I am hurrying,” Dean grumbled, walking out behind her with a duffel bag over his shoulder. “Get your shit in the trunk, Quinn.”

She laughed. “It’s locked. And don’t be such a grump,” she said, leaning on the wall and waiting while Dean opened the trunk and loaded his bag inside. “Aren’t you excited?”

“I am!” Sam said, coming into the garage with his own duffel bag over his shoulder and a stack of books in his arms.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” Floyd said, following Sam up the stairs, laden with weapons and equipment. “What are we hunting again?”

Chato, side by side with Cas, wandered into the garage. He didn’t have anything, since he, Waylon, and Digger had elected to stay behind for this. But he’d at least bothered to come see them off, which was more than anyone could say for Digger. “An encantado,” he said, pronunciation perfect. “Good fucking luck with that, I hope you all can swim.”

“We’ll be fine,” Harley said, tossing her duffel bag into the trunk on top of Dean’s and dusting off her hands. “Right, angel?”

Cas smiled. “Of course we will,” he said. “We always are, somehow.”

Dean and Sam yanked open the garage door. Harley pecked Chato on the cheek and climbed into the backseat of the Impala, stretching out luxuriously on the leather seats. Floyd slid inside, followed by Sam, with Cas getting into the front seat. Dean, the eternal worrywart, gave Chato the last directions about what to eat while they were gone and what to do if they were gone too long and so on, before finally getting in himself.

“I hope you’re all ready,” Dean said. “We’re goin’ to California.”

“I’m more than ready,” Harley said, taking Floyd’s hand.

He shot her a grin. “Guess I’m ready, too.”

“Always,” Cas said, smiling at Dean.

“Let’s get moving,” Sam said.

Dean nodded. He turned the key in the ignition and the Impala roared to life. Harley relaxed as the long black car pulled out of the garage and onto the road. Her hand was warm and secure in Floyd’s, she had friends in the car all around her, an open road ahead, and a life worth living.

“Music?” Sam asked after a minute.

“Sure,” Dean said, flashing a grin into the backseat. He reached out and turned on the stereo and a tape clicked to life, music rolling out of the Impala’s speakers. Dean tapped on the steering wheel, preempting the vocalist singing. “Right now, it’s your tomorrow, right now, c’mon, it’s everything…”

It took Harley a minute to recognize the music, since it had been so damn long since she’d really sat and listened to any classic rock, but when she did she couldn’t hold back a wide smile up at Dean in the rearview mirror. “Van Halen?” she asked.

“Can’t have a decent road trip without ’em,” Dean said.

The Impala turned onto the highway, and as they accelerated into the rising sun, Harley felt like maybe, just maybe, their tomorrow would be all right.

***

INCREDIBLE fanart by InnocentDays!!!