#we’ve been deprived of long haired crowley for FAR too long

[milesroundtheworld]

If crowley doesn’t have slightly grown out disheveled hair in s3 I’m going to have to take action.

[supernaturalfreewill]

Your name: submit What is this?

Words: 3,557 Demon!Dean x Reader Warnings: swearing? always. A/N: THAT'S RIGHT IT'S FINALLY HEEEERE! This is the third part of a mini-series! Read Part 1 and 2 first!

Dean was leaning his elbows on the worn and scratched bar, a double of something in a glass with melting ice, yet untouched, sitting in front of him. Vastly unlike his usual bouts of karaoke and boisterous laughter, he was silent and brooding. His face was covered by a shadow that had nothing to do with the dim, recessed lighting.

After Crowley had made himself scarce, Dean had rushed to get as far away from that shell of you as he could. He wondered now if he should have stayed. What would Crowley have his minions do with (he hesitated on the next word) you? Would they burn you? Surely not… They would want every chance to bring you back if they could—if Crowley could still use you as a pawn he would. Dean wouldn’t put it past Crowley to try to have some other demon use your body as a meatsuit, maybe even pretend to be you. The idea sickened and infuriated him. Or, Dean wasn’t sure if this was worse, the thought of you rotting in a hole somewhere. Or in some makeshift morgue in hell… frozen like just anybody on a steel slab.

He slammed down his drink and raised a finger to the bartender to ask for another. Why was he tied up in knots about this? He was a fucking demon! He nearly shook his his head, as if that would shake out the thoughts of you… but what was this thick, heavy brick in his chest?

Just as his glass was being refilled, two demons he didn’t know sidled in through the door. Dean was immediately aware of them, like a sixth sense, but they didn’t seem to take any note of him sitting like a loner at the empty bar counter as they made their way to a nearby table.

This bar was home for many misfits and representatives of the seedier side of Chicago’s underbelly—human and non-human, both an underworld meeting place and parting of ways. It wasn’t uncommon for other demons to spend time there, which is part of the reason Dean had chosen it, and it looked like he was in luck. He was hoping to overhear news without having to lower himself to contacting Crowley—or worse… Sam and Cas.

Relieved that they hadn’t yet detected him, Dean hung his head. He realized that any one who was on the lookout for him probably was used to him announcing himself with drunken antics and Jimmy Buffet karaoke. No one was looking for him as the solemn nobody at the bar, keeping a hangover at bay with more than a little hair of the dog, quietly and solitarily.

Fortunately, the two demons took a couple of stools at the end of the bar. They were close enough that Dean would be able to overhear, but not close enough that he needed to be worried about being discovered. Still, he turned his shirt collar up and hung his head lower, blocking the bottom half of his face with his glass.

”It’s not as if it’s our fault,” began minion #1. He was clearly worked up and had a twitchy kind of nervous energy, apparently as a result of some distress. “We aren’t the ones that—you know… Somehow it always falls down on us little guys! We’re just average joes! We just follow orders!”

The second demon was much calmer and ordered two drinks before responding. “That isn’t the point. It’s not about it being our fault… Anyway, it doesn’t matter. If what I’ve been hearing is true, none of our allegiance to the King or anyone or anything else will matter. I’ve been in contact with some of my old, old allies. They’ve been hearing some whispering over the deep waves that Crowley may have made a miscalculation.”

The first demon stopped dead in the middle of a sip. “What do you mean? Miscalculation?” He glanced around the bar, apparently nervous, and Dean took that moment to take a deep drink. “…about Winchester?” the demon whispered.

Now Dean was on high alert.

”Mmm,” the second demon shook her head through a sip. “No. About the one he tried to turn.”

The first demon leaned in ever closer. “So… so what? It worked? She’s a demon now?”

The woman demon laughed. “Maybe.”

”Well, what?” The first demon’s voice was somewhat demanding now, clearly sick of his friend playing coy with her information.

”You know how we collect souls? Well, the whole reason behind it is the amount of concentrated power contained in just one human soul...” She gave her a friend a conspiratorial look, seemingly waiting for him to work out the rest of what she was saying. When he didn’t seem to understand, and only stared intensely, she scoffed and finally continued. “Think about it. Y/N still had an entirely human soul in her body when Crowley tried to turn her. If it did work, and I have reasons to believe that it did, there is going to be a demon powered by a supercharged nuclear reactor walking around.”

”Holy shit,” remarked the first demon. His friend scoffed and rolled her eyes.

”Y/N could be the next big thing. Bigger than Crowley, bigger than the Knights of Hell, bigger than Lucifer.”

Eyes wide, there was only one final question asked. “Well, what does that mean… for all of us?”

”Hell if I know. Nobody knows which way this is gonna swing. But me? I’m getting the hell out of here. If you’re smart, you will too.”

When next the two of them glanced around, all that was left of the loner sharing the bar with them was an empty glass the door swinging closed behind him.

_ _ _ _ _ _

”We should stop,” Cas said. He kept his eyes straight ahead, staring through the windshield.

”Why?” Sam asked, doing the same.

”You haven’t eaten today,” Cas replied.

”I’m not hungry.”

”Humans need food, Sam. You need to eat.” He finally turned his piercingly blue eyes over to Sam behind the wheel. “You also haven’t slept in two days.”

”So what?” Sam said. “We’ve got bigger things happening here.”

”Sam…” Cas’s tone was stern and elicited a sigh from Sam.

”Every time we stop, we just waste time and fall farther behind.”

”We won’t be any use to Y/N or Dean with you in a weakened, sleep-deprived, starved condition. Besides,” he said, smoothing his hands down his coat, “we have little to go on right now.”

”Little isn’t nothing,” Sam contradicted, but he put on his turn signal before the next exit and followed the curve off the main highway.

Cas said nothing as Sam brought the car to rest in a parking space by the motel office. “I’ll get a room, order a pizza, and sleep for a few hours. Then we hit the road again, okay?” Cas nodded.

Sam threw his duffle bag down on one of the beds. “What are you going to do?” he asked Cas. “You know I can’t sleep if you’re just going to be sitting in here.” There was exhaustion in Sam’s voice, and Cas was relieved he had managed to convince him to take some food and sleep.

”I have some places I could go to try and find some information. Nothing dangerous,” he added in response to the look on Sam’s face.

”Alright… well, don’t let me sleep past six am.” Cas only nodded.

When Sam turned around after placing his order for a pizza over the phone the angel was gone. He placed his pistol and demon knife on the nightstand and salted all the windows. The door would have to wait until his food arrived.

Later that night, Sam fell asleep in a slumped pile against the headboard, sleeping with the hilt of the demon knife in his hands.

He was startled awake by the once familiar sound of his cell phone ringing… It had been so long since he had even ventured out of the bunker that it now sounded foreign and unexpected. Nobody called him anymore… Not since—Sam shook himself awake and dove into his bag to dig it out. He was hoping that your name would be flashing on the screen, but he was disappointed.

”Hello?”

”Sam?”

Sam rubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah. Yeah, who is this?”

”It’s Everett.”

Everett Hanson was a hunter from Washington state that Sam and Dean used to keep in touch with on a regular basis. They’d helped him with some jobs, and he had returned the favor. He was a good man and a good hunter, but the call was perplexing. Everyone in the hunting community knew about Dean… and everyone had left Sam well alone after their initial calls trying to get through to him, trying to offer help, went unanswered for months. Eventually the phone had just stopped ringing. They’d all started to just call Y/N on occasion instead. “Hey—yeah, hey. Sorry. Didn’t recognize your voice at first,” Sam said.

”Well, it’s been a while…” he replied. There was a stretch of thick silence and Sam felt that familiar sickening sensation rising in his stomach.

”Yeah… yeah. Sorry. I just woke up so I’m a little out of it. Umm, what’s up?” Sam asked.

”I was sorta hoping that you could tell me that,” Everett said with a laugh. “You haven’t been hunting up my way lately, have you?”

”No. No, I’m, uhh, about twenty-five hundred miles away actually,” he said with a dry laugh. “Why?”

There was a sigh on the other end of the phone. “It’s the damndest thing. I’ve been tracking a few things around here. I’ve had a werewolf in the works for about a month and a suspected nest of vamps I’ve been keeping an eye on. All of the sudden, gone.”

Sam stopped in the middle of his pacing toward the table where he had a notebook laying out. “What do you mean ‘gone’?”

”I mean gone. I found the werewolf dead in the national forest, body full of silver. I went to do some more surveillance on the vampires and after a whole night of no activity I went up to the house, peaked in through the window. Blood and decapitated vamps everywhere. I’m telling you, Sam. I walked through that whole house… I have no idea what went down in there, but a couple spots looked like something had been vaporized.”

”Vaporized?”

”Just solid uniform blood spray on every damn wall, like a red mist. Maybe it was a hunter, but I don’t know anything about anything that can vaporize vampires. Does that mean anything to you?”

Sam was scribbling notes in his notebook as fast as he could. “Not off the top of my head. Maybe another rival group came in, nest on nest action?” Sam offered.

”I’ve seen that before. Those scenes are usually a total mess,” Everett said. “Nothing but chaos when you have two groups of vamps fighting. There was blood everywhere, but somehow this was clean, methodical. And I didn’t see any bodies I didn’t recognize. All those dead vamps, at least that I found in that house in identifiable pieces, were the same ones I’ve been watching.”

”Right,” Sam said, rubbing another hand over his face.

”And what about the werewolf?” Everett asked. “I’ve been in this job long enough… I don’t believe in coincidences. And there’s one more thing…” Sam waited for him to continue. “We’ve had a couple homicides in Seattle lately that have raised an eyebrow or two.”

”How so?”

”No sign of forced entry, everything locked up from the inside. Every one of the victims was a suspect in some real nasty crimes—murder, rape, kidnapping, that type of thing.”

”Huh. Sounds like you’ve got a vigilante running around in Seattle,” Sam said.

”That’s not the weirdest part… every one of them was killed in the way their suspected victims were tortured or killed. And for a few of those cases, that information wasn’t even public knowledge.”

Sam’s head was spinning. “So--so, you’ve got someone murdering suspected bad guys and someone taking out our kind of bad…”

”Yeah… I thought I’d call you because, uhh, you know. It could be a hunter or somethin’ and you and—you’re the best out there.” Sam knew he had stopped himself from mentioning Dean.

Sam said it for him. “Or Dean.”

There was a pause on the other end. “Yeah, I thought of—I thought of that. What do you think?”

Sam sighed into the phone. “I don’t know. Maybe. But from the little bit I’ve heard he doesn’t seem to be much concerned with anything as a demon, let alone hunting down humans for justice killings…”

”Hmm. Well, keep it on your radar. I think something funny is going on here.”

”Yeah. Will do. Hey, thanks for the call,” Sam said.

”I’ll keep you updated if I figure anything out,” Everett said. “You take care of yourself, Sam.” Sam could hear the concern and pity in his voice, and he tried to ignore it.

”You too. And hey, Everett?”

”Yeah?”

”It was good to hear from you. Stay safe out there.”

”You too.”

Just as Sam ended the call, he heard the rustling of Cas’s wings behind him. “Cas? Where have you been? It’s 10 o’clock.”

”I know,” Cas said.

”You were supposed to wake me up at six,” Sam said.

”I know,” Cas repeated, clearly unconcerned. “But you needed to rest.” He looked at the cell phone in Sam’s hand and his eyes narrowed. “You had a call?”

”Huh? Oh. Yeah. Everett Hanson, out in Washington. He’s had some weird stuff happening out by him. Wanted to know if I had any ideas.”

”What exactly has been going on?” Cas’s expression was now intense, and Sam thought he could read more meaning behind it than the simple question. He quickly explained the monsters, both human and non-human, disappearing and the more he talked the darker the shadow on Cas’s face became. “So, what do you think?”

Cas paced the length of the room away from Sam, hands in the pockets of his trench coat. When he turned back to face Sam, his face was even darker.

”Cas?” Sam prodded.

”You remember when I said something it felt as though something had shifted, that there was some sort of change in energy or power?” Sam nodded at the angel. “A suspicion has been growing in my mind and while you slept I did what I could to gather information from some secure and friendly sources.” Cas hesitated. He seemed concerned about how Sam was going to react.

”And?” Sam urged, taking a few steps toward the angel. “Is it Dean?”

Cas shook his head. “No… I believe it’s Y/N.”

_ _ _ _ _ _

Dean was seated on the end of the bed, sinking into the fluffy down comforter, kicking his boots off and eyeing the room service menu. A rhythmic buzzing distracted him from his debate about whether he should order two or three bottles of Blue Label and he caught sight of his phone buzzing on the nightstand, the glowing blue screen casting a faint glow in the dim room.

Perplexed, Dean grabbed it and eagerly looked at the incoming number: blocked. Strange. This was a brand new and completely clean phone. He’d stolen it on his way out of Chicago simply to have in case he decided he needed to make a call out. He hadn’t expected anyone to be calling in. Curiosity got the best of him, though he figured he would probably just be annoyed to hear Crowley’s douche-y accent on the other end of the line, and he answered.

”Hello?”

He was met with only silence, but he let it stretch, straining to hear anything on the other end.

Finally, at length, he broke it. “Hello?” This time he spoke a little more demandingly.

Still complete silence. Nothing. He could hear nothing but his own breathing. But Dean could feel that someone was on the other end. And he could also feel that he was being toyed with.

”Crowley?!” Dean roared, but he was still met with nothing more than a little hushed white noise. “How did you get this number?” He didn’t like feeling challenged, or played with. He was a fucking demon! “Answer me!” Dean roared.

Click. The call had disconnected. Dean looked angrily down at the phone in his hand, completely perplexed. Stomping across the room he considered the locked screen for only a few seconds before he snapped the phone in half.

Fuming, but also unsure of why he was so angry about just a stupid, probably spam, phone call, Dean wrenched open the fridge and pulled everything out of the mini-bar. Just as he was dumping the contents of the first little bottle in his mouth, the hotel room phone range loud enough he nearly jumped.

He stared hard at the little red light on the phone, burning with every ring. He knew he could just not answer. He could just ignore it.

So he did.

Four rings.

Five rings.

Six rings…

And finally silence.

Dean continued to stare at the phone, waiting with baited breath to see if the light would blink to indicate a message had been left.

There was nothing.

Why was he so on edge? He knew the answer. Of course he did. But he kept reminding himself that he was a fucking demon! Why was it nagging him so much? He couldn’t get that image of you on that slab out of his head.

Dean let out a frustrated yell and smashed his fist down on the little table, sending a splintered crack across the top. And just as he grabbing his next little bottle of liquor and making his way back to the room service menu—that goddamn phone rang again.

This time Dean rushed to the receiver and pressed it to his ear—but he said nothing. And at first there was only silence again. And he waited.

He knew there was someone on the other end. He could feel it. And his heart was racing in his chest.

And finally--

”Hello, Dean.”

Dean was stunned—frozen where he stood—but there was no mistaking it for anyone else. It was your voice on the other end of the line. And still he asked, “Who is this?” His voice deep and quiet, almost a whisper.

There was a light laugh, almost just an exhale. “Don’t kid yourself. You know it’s me.”

And he did. It was undeniably you. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t what version of you this was. But he had a feeling--“I saw you. You were—“

”Dead?” you interrupted. “I guess not.”

Dean didn’t know where to go next. He felt unbalance. It was obvious that you were the one in control in this situation, and he hated it. ”So, what are you now? You’re a demon?” His voice was almost demanding and you smiled, knowing that you had managed to shake Dean Winchester, not something many could say.

”What do you think?” you countered.

Dean gulped at the tightness that was inexplicably forming in his throat. “I don’t what this is—or if this is even really—“ he hesitated to say your name, “But I’m not playing your games. I have plenty of better things to be doing,” he said.

”That’s too bad,” you said.

Dean hesitated. There was a twinge near the base of his skull, something that just felt… odd. And still he couldn’t just hang up the phone. It was almost out of his control. He needed to hear the next word. And the next. “Why?” he finally asked.

”It’s just a shame. I was just thinking of you. In fact, I’ve been thinking of you since I woke up again.” You waited to see if Dean would say anything more, but he wasn’t sure how to interpret your response. “You don’t want to see me?”

Utter confusion was all consuming now and he actually sighed into the phone. “What the hell is this?” he asked in frustration.

Your tone of voice changed completely when next you spoke. Now it was hard and cold. “Don’t you want to replace that limp, pale, dead version of me you have been carrying around in your head?” you asked.

Dean felt a lurch somewhere between his lungs. “…How did—“ he cleared his throat, angry to find that his voice had betrayed some of his unbalance, “How’d you know that?”

There was that light laugh again, really just your breath in his ear. It made Dean feel like you were standing right behind him, sending the hairs on the back of his neck rising like there was a wave of static electricity behind him. “Because I put it there.”