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Dean’s twelve and bored in another health class. He’s staring at a pyramid in the margins of a textbook labeled The Hierarchy of Needs, only half-listening to the dull, muted monotone of the teacher’s lesson in the background. He’s confident he’s got this dumb thing down. After all, he’s seen it about three times this year, because they keep moving schools in the middle of the unit, and every junior high in the country apparently offsets their curriculum by one or two weeks with the sole intention of keeping Dean from getting to the really juicy bits of health.
Lecture complete, the teacher falls into his desk chair and dispassionately assigns a perky student in the front row to hand out worksheets. The promised land of goofy genitalia illustrations and condoms on bananas that lies in chapter seven is a distant dream to the depressing reality of this, a dumb photocopied doodle where he’s expected to write in where he stands on the pyramid. What he aspires to achieve in his life next. His stomach appreciates the irony of the whole situation and growls loudly as his hand hovers indecisively between the bottom tier labeled physiological needs and the next up, safety.
Are you eating? and Are you afraid for your life? Teachers usually assume the answer to that is a given for the kids in a junior high school class, but most the time it really—isn’t. For Dean.
Not that he can write he’s not getting fed on a school worksheet. He can’t. And he can’t write that he’s not safe, either. He’s not stupid, and he doesn’t want CPS on his tail. But it’s pretty obvious, every time this dumb unit gets drilled into his head, that he’s never gonna move past the “safety” tier, not in his chosen career path. He’s always gonna be afraid for his life, right up until he doesn’t have it anymore. He taps his pen once on love/belonging section, then draws a thick line between esteem and self-actualization, like he’s hovering between them. Like he even has the option of getting to the top of the pyramid when there’s always this invisible monster hovering just under the surface that he’s too busy chasing real monsters to pursue.
His hand hovers over the Self-Actualization Goals line of the worksheet. He starts the shaky outline of a “B,” then a “T,” and crosses both of them out, and that’s when the perky student handing out worksheets passes by him again, rubbernecking his paper before she resettles at the front of the classroom. Her name is Tiffany or Brenda or something. People seem to like her. There’s a Tiffany or Brenda at every school.
“I’ll bet I know what Deanna’s self-actualization goal is,” she stage whispers, leaning toward her neighbor. The henchman is giggling before Briffany’s even delivered the punchline. “I’ll bet she wants to be an even bigger dyke than she already is. Why else would she wear that awful flannel every day?”
Dean looks down at the dirt wedged under his stubby fingernails and the Bic pen cradled in the smooth, delicate softness of his hands. At the paper on the desk, and at the name in the corner like a foreign language.
Deanna Winchester, fourth period.
Then, on the line about self-actualization, he writes Be a bigger dyke than I already am. They’ll be on to the next town before the stupid health teacher even grades it, anyway. On to the next monster.
It’s less of a lie than he’ll ever admit out loud.
When he’s thirteen, Dean starts bleeding, and Dad drops him off where someone else can deal with it. Pastor Jim does, in his own way, with a discreet packet of bulky pads and pamphlets about abstinence from his Sunday school classes that do nothing to smooth the growing waves of tumult that are always at the back of Dean’s brain, now. The itchy-skinned wrongness that’s grown and grown and grown the more he’s tried to ignore it.
It’s raining out, so they take shelter in the chapel with Pastor Jim for want of anything better to do. Usually he’s all for playing with Sammy, but today he sits alone and sleepy, arms wrapped low around his middle, questing fingers taking in the subtle new flare of his hips and seeking to soothe the aggressive ache inside him. Sammy drives his tiny matchbox cars along the tops of of the pews, rumbling out little vroom vroom noises every time he jumps them across a gap.
Pastor Jim lights candles at the head of the church for evening services, one by one by one, until they light up the chapel, replacing the faded multicolored sunlight filtering weakly through the stained-glass windows overhead.
Dean gets up, and no matter how he tries to muffle his unwieldy feet with soft steps, they echo loud and awkward in the vaulted room. He stops just short of a statue of the Virgin Mary off to the right of the green-draped pulpit, hand still resting gently above the bloated, painful curve of his lower belly. Mary smiles at him, benevolent and wise and empty-eyed, her arms outstretched.
“Do you think God makes mistakes?” he blurts, eyes still on the sweet, feminine features. The demure bow of her mouth. The soft chin to match his own.
He’s not sure where it comes from. He doesn’t believe in God. At first, he hadn’t known he was supposed to believe, and by the time he figured out he was supposed to, he found he didn’t quite know how.
Pastor Jim stops lighting candles and Dean can feel his eyes on the side of his head, can just barely see the thin tendrils of smoke wafting upward from the dowel the pastor had been using to light candles in his periphery. He also notes the absence of the little vroom vroom s behind him, can almost see Sammy peeking above the edge of a pew, watching the exchange with his mouth hanging open.
“What’s this about?”
Dean doesn’t answer, but the silence is leaden and dragging. He can feel Pastor Jim formulating his own assumptions across the room, the same way he had been ever since the first time Dad dropped him on the good pastor’s doorstep. He makes the only pitying assumptions one could possibly make about an ill-kempt, transient child who couldn’t stay in one school long enough to learn why he was even bleeding in the first place.
Pastor Jim sighs. “Oh, Deanna. There are so many things in your life that may seem like a curse. You have experienced so much at such a young age.”
Pastor Jim is at his side all of the sudden, and Dean starts at the feel of a hand on his shoulder. It’s a marvel how quietly the pastor moves. How comfortable he seems in his own skin. His smile feels real, and he wears it like he knows what it means. Like there’s no dissonance when he looks in his mirror, and the way that it looks on his face is the way it’s supposed to look.
“But I think you’ll find that everything has its own logic. Its own intent. Its own reason.” He inclines his head gently to Mary, a deference and an example. “God and his angels are executors of a plan beyond our understanding. So, no. I don’t believe He makes mistakes.”
Dean looks back and forth between Mary and Jim, Mary and Jim and thinks—well, easy for Pastor Jim to say. Pastor Jim has a dick.
Dean takes the medical shears from the first aid kit to his hair in the height of summer when he’s fourteen.
He doesn’t know why he wears it long anymore. It frames his face wrong, thick and wavy where it falls—softening edges that are already too soft. It has a nasty habit of going to a bright, brassy, gold, so rich it looks like someone dyed it, when he spends time in the sun. He doesn’t like brushing it. Hates styling it. Hates how impractical it is when it gets in his face. And he figures that it’s time to get rid of it while it’s hot and he still has an excuse, anyway.
He’s worn it long all his life, just near the same length it was when his mom burned. It’s tickled his shoulders since he was old enough to remember it tickling. All the same, he doesn’t really think twice when it falls in thick clumps to the emerald green tile of the hotel-bathroom-of-the-week. He looks down at his stubby toes and tucks them into the fine layer of it on the floor, curling them there while he shimmies and shivers to get off the stray hairs still making their way down the back of his collar. Sam perches at the edge of the tile with a book in his hand, discreetly watching Dean discreetly watching himself in the mirror. Dean’s halfway pleased with what he sees there for the first time he can recall in a long, long while, even though the cut itself is uneven and sloppy.
“What do you think?” he says, spreading his arms for Sammy, doing a hips-first strutting swirl and spreading the mess at his feet.
Sam quirks his mouth. Frames Dean between his thumbs and forefingers like a dweeb. “S’good.” he says finally, definitive. “But…”
Dean turns back to the mirror, detail work now. He imitates the hairdressers he’s seen working in movies, squeezing pieces of his hair flat between two fingers and then chopping the ends even.
“But?” he says, poking his tongue out as he works. “But what?”
“But Dad won’t think so.”
Dean looks at himself, finishing the cut in silence. Finally noticing the cracks that cut through his reflection in the crappy bathroom mirror.
Sam isn’t wrong.
John Winchester is a man of contradictions. Most of the time he’s a hardened hunter, a single-function machine with a gun permanently affixed to one palm and a machete affixed to the other. And when he’s that John Winchester, he doesn’t mind how Dean looks. How Dean acts. In fact, he likes it. Prefers it. It suits his needs, then, that Dean’s—well, low maintenance. Someone who’s sure of himself and his body and the things it can do. The Dean that Deanna usually is until he looks in the mirror.
But—
But the rest of the time, Dad is drunk. And the older Dean gets, the more Dad tells him he looks like Mom when he’s wasted. Dad breaks him down, feature by feature, until he’s a parade of disembodied organs, a series of puzzle parts that his dad could dissemble and and smash back together in the shape of Mary Winchester.
And to some extent, Dean likes it. Wants more of it. Hungers for the comparison to something his dad clearly finds so good and pure and happy. But it exhausts its welcome fairly quickly, because as much as he loves that he might have his mom’s sterling character or charming wit, he doesn’t—he doesn’t want—
Her nose. Her lips. Her eyelashes.
Or—her hair.
He doesn’t want to be growing into the woman his mom was.
All the same, he’s expecting a reprimand at most. A few harsh words, maybe some extra laps during his workout. He waits up that night to face his punishment like a man, reading under the buzzing light in the kitchenette while the humid heat drifts in the window and cicadas chirp outside. Dad comes in at nearly two, when Sam has long-since given up waiting with him.
And of all the things he psyched himself up for while he waited—he isn’t expecting his dad to cry.
“Jesus,” Dad says the moment he steps in the door, voice soft with the hour and the Jack he’d clearly pounded back behind the wheel on the way home. He drops his duffel in the entryway and reaches out for Dean’s face, palms cupped softly. Dean’s flinched back automatically before he realizes that’s silly, and he lets his dad draw his fingers through the new liberating shortness of his hair, same as Dean had that morning. They share the same quiet reverence, but he suspects there are different reasons behind it for the both of them. “Jesus, Deanna, what happened?”
Shaken, Dean feigns nonchalance, even as the first whiskey tear leaks its slow way down his father’s cheek.
“Got hot,” Dean says, voice trembling and high and thin. “Decided it’d be easier to take care of this way.” He clears his throat, pushing past the tremors, and adds, “Sir,” in a gravelly baritone.
John looks into Dean’s eyes for a long moment, big hand still cupping the curve of his scalp, until he backs off, resigned and heavy-limbed. He runs a hand over his face, over his mouth, trailing tears all the while, and maybe he thinks Dean can’t hear him when he mumbles, “What would she fuckin’ say if she saw you now?”
But he can. And even though Dad doesn’t seem to remember it in the morning and acts surprised to see his short hair for the first time all over again—Dean does. Dean does remember. He lets it haunt him and haunt him and haunt him, like a cursed object that’s made its way under his skin and stuck there.
What would his mom say if she could see him now? What would she think of what he’s become?
Or, perhaps more importantly, what he hasn’t?
There’s no way to answer any of that without a big helping of heartache, so he just lets his dad be grateful when, on a hunt a little over a month later, a kappa tries to drag him into a water trap on a golf course by his hair but can’t get a good enough grip.
He’s got to take the wins where he can get them.
When he’s sixteen, Sam catches him duct taping his tits to his chest. Dad trucked in a bunch of supplies the night before, emptying out the car before he took it out for another week-long bender, and he had a whole couple of rolls he hadn’t used on his last hunt. And the idea grabs hold of him while he’s nursing a cup of coffee and doesn’t let go. He cups the handful he’s got on his chest, pushes the sagging weight hard against his breastbone and thinks. Well Dad’s not gonna be home for a while anyway.
When the door to the bathroom swings open halfway through the process, though, Dean freezes, tits mostly covered, a piece of tape he’d been wrapping around his chest like a string of christmas lights still held out in front of him, still attached to the roll. He’s terrified for a moment that it’s Dad, back a week early and disgusted with him from the bathroom door. But it’s just Sam. And Sam—thinks. That face he gets sometimes, the stupid neanderthal brow where he’s visibly considering.
The bite of the duct tape is hard and unyielding as they consider each other. His skin isn’t breathing underneath, and he’s already started to sweat and chafe at every point where skin meets plastic. His tits are squished up in his armpits somewhere, and even though he’s uncomfortable as hell—he gets the same little glut of satisfaction he got when he lopped off that first tuft of long hair and looked at himself in the mirror years ago.
He likes the shape of himself. The silhouette.
Sam furrows his brow. He’s muddy from the knee down. He’s supposed to be at soccer practice.
“What are you doing?” he says slowly.
Dean brings the strip of duct tape up to rip with his teeth. He says, “What are you doing?” but it’s barely intelligible around the tape in his mouth. Sam gets it anyway. Dean sticks the dangling tail-end of the tape somewhere under his elbow.
“Coach called off practice early. It’s raining,” he says. He looks over Sam’s shoulder to the kitchenette window, and it’s definitely pitch black outside, murky with heavy rain. He hadn’t even noticed. Sam points at the tape.
“That can’t be comfortable. Is that comfortable?” Sam pulls back to grab his own flat chest, wincing in sympathy. Dean reaches for where he cast off his t-shirt on the top of the toilet tank and pulls it over his head. He shuffles around Sam to get out of the bathroom, but Sam seems to have forgotten why he burst in on Dean in the first place, and he follows him back out.
“Do you do that all the time? I don’t think that’s good for you.”
“Don’t you have to piss or something?” he grumbles.
“Plus...pulling it off…” Sam grimaces.
“It’s fine, okay? It’s—whatever.”
“So you do it often?”
“No!”
“Why are you doing it now?”
“Just—leave it alone, Sam.”
“Is it some training thing? Is Dad making you?”
“Leave it!” he shouts, a whole decibel higher than he generally tries to go. It’s a shrill screech and he hates everything about it. “Just leave it!” His chest struggles gamely against the new restriction, heaving strangely and forcing him to take panting, shallow breaths. To Sam’s credit, he’s quiet for almost a minute before he points it out.
“See. You can’t breathe properly.”
“Oh my God you fucking twerp,” he pants. “I’m taking it off. Fine. Get me my fucking leatherman.”
Sam narrows his eyes, but he goes to Dean’s duffel across the room and fishes for the knife while Dean tries to regulate his breathing and act like he’s not sweating like a pig. Sam hands over the knife and gives him one more up and down glance.
“You look weird,” he says. “It just...it looks weird, Deanna.”
Dean doesn’t say anything.
When he goes back into the bathroom to do the deed and sees his own reflection in the mirror, he can see why Sam thought it looked—weird. Why it looked stupid. It was. It did. He didn’t look like—like a dude or something. Didn’t look any more like the broad-shouldered, well-stubbled, macho-man Dean that lived in his brain. He looked like a flat-chested dyke in a baggy Goodwill t-shirt.
He cuts the tape off. Nicks himself twice with the sharp knife tip and nearly screams when he rips the goddamn tape off his nipples like a band-aid. And he comes out of the bathroom without even his sports bra on, because who the fuck cares.
Sam looks at him different from then on. Looks at him like he’s a puzzle that he can put together, if he only had the right pieces. And sometimes he looks to Dean like Dean has them, like he has the vocabulary to talk about shaving his head and duct taping his chest and talking like his throat is filled up with gravel all the time. But Dean never finished health class, and he doesn’t have the words. He just knows he’s still stuck down at the bottom of the pyramid.
A couple years later, Sam hits his full teenage growth spurt, sprouts up about a foot taller than Dean and gets the big attitude to go along with it, and he stops asking Dean about his feelings. Dean’s just another thing that makes his family not normal and another reason, ultimately, to get away from it. And that’s probably a good thing, because Dean doesn’t really know how he would express how much he covets Sam’s big arms and full chest and strong chin and body hair without sounding like a fucking creep, anyway.
When Sammy leaves for college, Dean, twenty-two and tipsy and touch-starved at a bar in Kentucky, figures that his virginity is a stupid thing to be clinging to anyhow. It’s been a long time since he dropped out of high school, a long time since someone called him a dyke to his face. It’s been a long time since he slipped a finger or two or three through his own sloppy wetness and admitted to himself that it’s easy to get off to the feeling of something inside of him—as long as he didn’t think too hard about it. Shit isn’t getting any more normal and Dean isn’t any closer to being able to hop meatsuits ala some demonic entity. So that’s that. He picks the most inoffensive of the drunk fuckers that had been ogling him since he walked in. They exchange pleasantries, though Dean honestly can’t be fucked to remember his name, and then Dean takes him to his car.
It’s fine while the asshole’s mouth is occupied. He can’t get any words out as he divests Dean of his jacket and one, two, three tops. And then, following that, two nondescript gray sports bras that were keeping his tits as close to controlled as they ever got. Dean’s perched in his lap, hands tentatively curled on his shoulders, trying to act like he’s done this before.
“Buried fuckin’ treasure under here, sweetheart,” the guy says, mouthing at his tits. Dean tries to tune him out, tries not to think about the way this guy’s big hands span the whole of his waist, because it actually feels alright. “Where were you hidin’ these sweet things?” He pushes one up, then the other. Cups the one he hasn’t got his mouth all over. Rubs rough on the nipples with the palms of his hands. Dean’s never paid that much attention to his boobs except to resent them when they get in his way, but this guy is getting a hard-on just planting his mouth on them. Dean can feel the hot line in his pants and he’s driven to that more than anything, so he takes the initiative and dives into the guy’s fly.
Dean gets the sense you’re supposed to feel more than jealous when you see a real-life dick for the first time, but that’s all he’s got. It’s an okay dick as far as he can tell. It’s not pornstar dick, but it’s a nice size and a nice weight and it’s—he pushes it up against the denim still between his thighs with both hands and gasps softly, too softly. A noise that he hates. Like the demure little kittens in pornos.
It gets harder in his hand and he bites his lip to stifle the sound.
“You like that, gorgeous?” the fuckwit says, looking at Dean on top of him with a dumb, dazed look. “You like my cock, huh, Miss Sweet Deeeee-anna?”
Dean does. He likes it a whole lot. He just doesn’t like the running mouth it’s attached to. Dean figures that his show of looking like not-a-virgin must’ve gone over well with his captive audience, because it’s been all of five minutes in the backseat of his Baby, and this guy’s primed to get his dick wet. And Dean thought he was okay with it, thought he could do it, but then the guy starts tossing pussy around like it’s a hundred-dollar word.
“Want this cock in your sweet pussy, baby?” he says, and Dean goes cold to his toes, feeling, suddenly, like he’s outside himself, watching this, and he doesn’t know who he is anymore. “Wanna feel it inside your pussy?” He pops the p against Dean’s tits. Puh- ussy, and goes for Dean’s fly. He must take Dean’s shivery withdrawal as excitement. He never once slows down.
Dean’s not sure how he figured this was gonna go, if not to—intercourse. Maybe he was hoping some drunk asshole would let him feel up his dick in the back of a car, get his mouth around it a little, and that would be that. Maybe that was fucking naive.
When he was eighteen years old, there was a whole group of shifters in Dallas that preyed on the hookers outside a bar downtown, and Dad gave him a pencil skirt and a tube top and a handful of silver jewelry and told him, in so many words, to suck it up and slut it up. They needed bait.
He’s back there now. Standing on that street corner in clothes he couldn’t stand, pretending to sell parts of himself that he didn’t even want to acknowledge existed. And he remembers thinking to himself, optimistically, that he wouldn’t ever feel that exposed again. But the truth was, so long as you had a pair of tits and a round ass, no matter what lengths and layers you went through to hide them, people stared and people ogled and people thought of you like this guy. As a puh -ussy. If anything, being made to dress like a girl and put everything on display just made him about a hundred times more aware of all the ways people could tear you apart with their eyes and decide what you were before they even said so much as a word to you.
When Dean’s back in his body, back in the back seat of his car and suddenly quite sober, he finds he’s somehow ended up underneath the guy with the nice dick and the bad attitude, and he’s still running his mouth about how wet and hot Dean’s gonna be down there. Dean grounds himself with the creak of his hand clasping on Baby’s leather. Baby barely even yields in firm support. He takes in the hand that’s massaging the fading wetness inside his underwear despite the fact that Dean’s pretty sure he’s been borderline comatose for the past minute and a half, and then he suckerpunches the slathering idiot right in his dumb face.
He looks stunned right before Dean manages to find the door handle above his head, knee the mouthy motherfuck in the exposed nads, and send him sprawling out the side of the car onto the pavement outside, dick flapping and deflating and not looking near as impressive now. He somehow manages to get the door closed and locked and feels solidly on the ground, wholly, completely, at last, sprawled across one leather seat and panting into the upholstery. The guy is still squawking all indignant, pounding on the window, and the front of Dean’s pants are somewhere halfway down his thighs, but Baby has a way of making things melt away. Like he’s just a part of her leather and he doesn’t have to be a body at all anymore.
Over the next few months, he shacks up with his fair share of women and learns to give great head. He finds he likes the equipment well enough when the junk’s not in his trunk. And the next time he nuts up enough to try it with a man, it’s some poor, self-hating sonofabitch outside a gay bar in Des Moines. Dean’s close enough to a man for the meek little bastard to get off, close enough to a woman for him to not feel bad about it. He doesn’t use the p-word once—they’re both chasing the same fantasy. They make a fine pair.
Dean’s twenty-six, and he corners Sam at an apartment in Palo Alto with nothing but dismay when he sees how big his brother’s gotten. How tall he’s gotten. How effortlessly large and imposing he manages to be, just standing across the room. He tosses Dean around like dirty laundry, cleans his clock despite the fact that he’s been training for months in preparation for seeing his baby brother again. And Sam should be rusty damnit. He should be soft. But no. He’s got Dean pinned on the floor like a stuck butterfly, struggling under one of his massive forearms, in five seconds flat.
It fucking stings.
Sam introduces him to his pretty girlfriend as his sister Deanna, and that stings even more. Because even though he’s still stuck down at survival, perpetually in self-actualization’s rearview mirror, he always figured. Well. Sam knows him better than anyone ever had. Probably better than anyone ever would. And if this is a part of him that even Sam can’t see, he figures there never ever will be anyone that does.
They never quite get around to talking about it either. There’s always something more important. College boy’s probably got the words Dean’s lacking now, if Dean ever bothered to pick his brain about it. Sammy could probably put a name to the gag reflex that wants to send his birth control pills right back up with his breakfast, to the quiet that comes to him when he’s done a bit too much human interaction, but—
Jess dies, Dad dies, Sam dies. Killer clowns, stolen identities, heart attacks, demon possessions, vengeful spirits, ticking clocks, reapers, and it’s just as little Deanna figured it would be, twelve years old and sitting in health class with a sad roadmap of her whole life laying out in front of her on a Xeroxed piece of printer paper. There was never going to be a point where Dean mattered more than the rest of the world. Where this did. Never going to be a point where Dean got to care about more than living to see tomorrow. There was never going to be a point where Dean got to slow down and unpack why it made his blood boil when Sam printed the surname Scully on one of his fake FBI IDs, or why he felt the need to dismantle an entire hotel room with a tire iron while he waited for his dumb little brother to come back alive from a hunt in a men’s prison. A hunt where he couldn’t follow. There was never going to be self-actualization for Deanna Winchester. And there was never going to be a Dean.
There was never going to be, and there never was. Because then Dean dies.
At least all bodies, Dean figures later, innards strung in front of him on some kind of hellish clothesline, look pretty much the same when they’re inside-out.
They say your whole life flashes in front of your eyes when you die, but it turns out that happens when you come back to life, too. Like a deluge of your brain learning how to remember, drawing memories back into it like a prickling limb filling with blood again. And even in a shallow grave, even in the midst of a dark, waking nightmare of being buried alive, there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance to be had when you, past you, the you whose body you inhabited for twenty-nine years and whose sensory memories you’re currently reabsorbing, is different from the one that’s scraping long fingernail gashes into the top of a plywood coffin.
He has the presence of mind to navigate his way to the surface, because in the pyramid of the hierarchy of needs, breathing is pretty much the rocky foundation that forms the base. When he gets to the surface, dazed, it’s—an overload. Everything’s the wrong size. Everything is too bright. The dirt is too hard, too warm. There’s no pain for the first time in a long time, but at the same time, everything is painful. Everything. Down to the drag of the dusty air in his lungs, like shards of glass scraping up his windpipe.
That’s why it probably takes him almost ten full minutes of panting into the dirt by his own shoddy gravemarker to realize that he has a cock.
He flops over onto his back and pats down the front of his pants. He doesn’t remember which pants he died in, but these definitely weren’t made to accommodate the new addition to his anatomy, and it’s not hard to feel the solid lump of it pressed up against his zipper. Likewise, everything up top is too small, too—nothing’s torn up, so Sam must’ve redressed him before he planted him, but his arms are about ready to bust through the seams of his plaid when he bends them at the elbow to feel his chest. Solid, not soft. No tits to be found, in his armpits or otherwise.
He has to stagger almost a mile before he finds a reflective surface, and he spends almost the whole trip there looking at his hands, his feet, trying to fathom the new size of himself, the new shape of himself, his new wide-legged gait. And when he gets to a desolate, empty gas station, miles from any civilization, the only thing he can even think to do is look into the bent and unpolished side of a freezer, the barely reflective sheen of an unclean window to see—himself. He trails in frantic disbelief from reflective surface to reflective surface through the store until he finds the entrance to a dingy little bathroom and flicks on the light. A mirror.
There he is.
There’s not a lot of grand revelation in it, not for him, because this is the Dean that’s been living in the back of his brain since he was old enough to differentiate the things that made a male male and a female female. He still looks like—himself. The body he’s used to. Deanna. He still looks like his mom, more like his mom than his dad despite everything, and there’s still an edge of femininity to his features, but anyone who looked at him would be able to see, easy as anything, the Dean that he didn’t have the words to bring to life before he died.
He lifts his shirt, half to reassure himself that there’s nothing scarred or torn, half to see the flatness of his stomach and chest. He runs his hands over the stubble on his face, marvelling at the texture. At the bend of his arm in his too-small sleeve, he pops all the stitches in the seam along his bicep with an audible tearing noise, and he would almost say he was giddy if this strange turn of events weren’t tempered by the sporadic memories of forty-odd years of torture, and if that specific brand of tear didn’t remind him of the way skin sounded when you pulled it clean away from muscle.
So mostly he’s. Overwhelmed. He holds off on checking out his new junk, not sure he can stomach a look at his penis when just the sight of his Adam’s apple is a little bit more than he can process.
(Well. He takes one little peek, thumbing the waistband of his pants open. Just to be sure he wasn’t—mistaken.)
(He wasn’t.)
(He repeats the resulting, “Well I’ll be damned,” in his new voice six times, just to make sure that wasn’t a mistake either.)
When he can tear himself away from his own reflection, he steals all the money from the register and then he takes his time lavishly sorting through the pathetic clothing selection in the tiny gas station, looking at the men’s sizes with a practical purpose rather than a covetous one for the first time in his life. He leaves in a men’s size large Gone Fishin’ shirt that hangs perfectly on his shoulders and a pair of douchey cargo shorts that need a belt to stay on his hips.
Freshly changed and starting to settle in his skin, a new feeling starts dogging at him. The sort of hair-raising feeling you get when you know there’s something watching you, the prickling awareness you get on your skin when you’re being scrutinized. He pushes past the feeling, trying to formulate a plan, and he remembers that there’s a pay phone outside he could use. A couple cars he could probably jack if his new broad fingers are half as clever as the old dainty ones were. He concentrates hard, even gets as far as going back to the register to steal some pay phone change when he remembers that—that if he called Bobby, if he somehow got to Sam right now. Even if they miraculously believed that he’d been ganked from hell, they’d never believe he got ganked out with a dick.
A fine tremble starts in his hands. He rubs the back of his neck, trying distractedly to wipe off the pair of eyes he feels planted there. He grabs a water bottle out of the humming freezer by the register and tips his head back to take a long, hard pull—acutely aware, again, of that crazy fucking Adam’s apple and the strength in his hand when he squeezes.
When he tips his head back down and takes a long, calming breath, resolving to figure out how exactly he’s gonna make this whole dick thing work—
There’s a guy in a trenchcoat standing outside. Stock still, hands hanging awkwardly at his sides, hair all mussed up like someone’s been running their hands through it. There’s a simultaneous sense of calm and tumult around him, ancient like a lightning storm but unpredictable like one too. He almost crackles with energy, and the store around Dean feels charged. Amped up past what he’d felt a few minutes ago, far past the static crackle of waking up in a completely new form.
Dean’s seen and felt enough non-humans to know that this is one, just from the way he carries himself. Dean rubs his hands together. Rubs up and down his thick forearms and up to the sturdy new divot of his breast and collarbone. He reorders his jangled nerves, aligns his scattered thoughts, and tries to be in the headspace his Dad pounded into him—he was always emphasizing forethought and planning for Dean on hunts. Always made sure that Dean knew he wasn’t tough enough, like John and Sam were, to strong-arm his way out of a situation. He was just a woman and he had to think.
He’s pretty far from that headspace though. There’s something invincible about the feeling of a bicep that strains against your shirt. Shoulder blades that ripple with power without even trying. Big feet, long legs, muscly thighs. And a height that meant he looked at things from a different angle—down instead of up. Past his nose instead of through his bangs.
So maybe he should set a trap. And maybe he shouldn’t go outside to face whatever unknown is waiting for him in an oversized suit and a trenchcoat. That’s probably what Deanna would’ve done. But today, Dean scans the store for a weapon. Eventually, he finds a big canister of salt and an iron ice pick that someone was using to chip at permafrost in a Coca Cola freezer by the entrance. And somehow, he feels more prepared to face whatever’s out there than he had at his most prepared in another body, another life. Like someone stripped off his armor and gave him a lighter, better set.
He approaches the open door, ice pick in one hand, salt in the other. The creature’s eyes travel to where he is even before he should be visible to it. There’s not much point in hiding anyway, so he stands in the doorframe, visibly armed.
Once Dean’s walking down the stairs of the gas station and onto the hard, dusty earth outside, the guy—tilts his head. His pupils seem to grow like a cat’s, and he makes no secret of taking in every inch he can of Dean’s body, from the top of his uneven haircut down to the new, strange, hairy legs that poke out from the bottoms of his stupid goddamn shorts.
He stops about twenty feet short of the guy and watches him watch Dean, watches the unabashed way he takes him in and, based on the surprisingly human uptick to the side of his mouth, the unabashed way he’s enjoying it. The longer he stands opposite him, the more electric the atmosphere becomes. By the time Dean’s decided to take the initiative and take a chance with the ice pick, storm clouds have gathered out of nowhere, and the wind is whipping his dumb coat every which way.
Despite the innocuous tax accountant getup and the pretty, blue-eyed meatsuit, he has a sneaking suspicion that whatever this thing is—he had something to do with dragging Dean’s ass out of hell. He thinks of Pastor Jim in that moment as he drums his fingers on the handle of the ice pick. He thinks of the kind of power whatever this is has to have not just to undo what had been done, but to restructure it. Reorder it. To take whatever preordained sort of destiny people like Pastor Jim thought there was and throw it out the fucking window without a thought.
He raises his makeshift weapon quick, a question hard on the edge of his tongue, brand-new testosterone blazing through his veins like a virgin shot of liquid heroin.
But the creature speaks first. His voice is low and crackly, a pitch Dean used to try and achieve when he had a woman’s vocal cords and all the determination in the world to defy their limits.
He says, “Hello, Dean.”
And his smirk breaks into a full-fledged smile, like he’s been waiting his whole life long just to say those two words.
The ice pick makes a solid thunk as it hits the earth and settles in the shadowed grass at the creature’s feet, dark on its own like something bigger than the both of them, something Dean can’t see, is casting a shadow longer than Dean is tall.
And in the husky, disbelieving depth of his new-old voice, Dean says, “What did you call me?"