Title: Awakenings
By: nancy
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: angst, violence, mild incest factor, WIP.
Note: Law & Order: SVU and Supernatural crossover.
Summary: Sam and Dean help out a NYC detective and his lover.

Elliot knew something was off with the two young guys the second he saw them hanging back at the edge of the crowd. There was something too…deliberate, maybe, about the way they gazed at the burnt wreck of the brownstone. One of them, the older one, looked familiar enough that he wondered if maybe the guy’s face was on a poster somewhere back at the house.

Walking over to Liv, he murmured, “ Three o’clock. Two young guys, leather jacket and jean jacket. What do you think?”

Liv kept looking down at her notebook as she turned and then just happened to glance up. She frowned over at him. “Not there anymore.”

Elliot looked over and found they were gone. He cursed under his breath and then said, “Definitely something off about those two.”

“Let me know if you see them again,” she replied, accepting.

He nodded and they went back to the case of a little girl burnt to ashes, only her necklace to identify where her body had been. There’d been an outline of her form etched into the wooden floor, though, as though accelerant had traced her out before being lit. Shaking his head, Elliot muttered, “Sick fucks.”

It was two days and no leads later that he caught another glimpse of one of the men. The younger, taller one stood across the street supposedly reading a magazine. He was right out in the open from where Elliot ate his breakfast sandwich on the way back to the car. Tossing his sandwich in the trash barrel he passed, Elliot angled across the street instead of continuing to the car.

The kid saw him, dropped the magazine and took off running.

Elliot instinctively went into pursuit, his own long stride barely making a dent in the distance between them. They were close in height, so the kid not only had the same length, but was younger and probably in better shape by virtue of his age. He shouted, “Stop! NYPD!” while pulling out his gun.

Not that the little fucker stopped. Elliot grit his teeth and turned the corner to find the kid had just vanished. People looked at him like he was crazy, ducking away from the sight of an open gun, and he pulled out his shield, flashing it at the nearest person to demand, “Did you see a kid in his twenties run this way?”

The woman shook her head, eyes wide, and scurried away.

“Fuck!” he hissed under his breath.

Later that day, after he’d done an extra thirty crunches while George looked on in amusement from the sofa, he snapped, “I am not out of shape!”

George chuckled and joined him on the floor, resting a hand on a sweaty thigh. “I know that. Elliot, it’s only natural to feel threatened. He was twenty years younger than you.”

“Fifteen,” Elliot protested. “Tops!”

Leaning in for a kiss, George promised, “You’re probably in much better shape than him. He just hid out somewhere you couldn’t see from your vantage point.”

“I’ll show you hiding out,” Elliot growled, pushing his lover flat on his back.

Later that night, when they were tucked away in bed, Elliot woke to a startling alertness and alarm. A dark shape moved in bedroom. A small, dark shape. Small enough to be a child. There was no reason for the all encompassing fear that swamped him as it came closer. No reason that he couldn’t move a muscle. No reason for the harsh, panting breaths from a chest tight enough that he vaguely thought about heart attacks and strokes.

And then it was all sound and fury. The front door crashed in and heavy boots stomped across the living room floor while the dark shape got closer. Close enough for Elliot to see a vague shape of a face that had no reason to exist and eyes filled with a terrifying yellow light.

George woke at the noise, jolting upright and demanding incoherently, “What is it? What’s happening?”

Elliot still couldn’t move and the…thing…kept getting closer.

A new voice started chanting in an unfamiliar language and the smell of gasoline hit just before a match lit.

“Elliot!” George shouted, grabbing at him, pulling at him, away from the thing that burst into flames right next to their bed.

An inhuman shriek sliced through the air as the thing went up faster than anything Elliot had ever seen.

George kept pulling at him, half-sobbing in his fear and panic, but couldn’t move him. Elliot couldn’t even move himself. The burning, shrieking thing lifted an arm towards him and all he could do was stare into yellow eyes, heart pounding and muscles frozen.

“Fuck!” a second unknown voice snarled. “It’s not going down, Sammy, hurry the hell up with that spell!”

The chanting continued in a louder voice and maybe there was more lighter fluid or gas, because the flames flared up to the ceiling and the shrieking at last stopped.

Finally able to move, Elliot rolled as fast and far from the thing as he could, shoving George off the bed in front of him. They landed in a heap on the floor, limbs tangled, but he was up and pulling the spare spare gun out of George’s bedside table to aim at the thing now in the middle of their bed. He shot it five times, twice in the head, but it kept coming, if slowly.

And then it simply broke apart into ash, drifting like dirty snowflakes onto the scorched blankets and quilts. The quilt which had survived five kids and a divorce, he thought inanely.

“Nice try with the gun there, buddy, but the only way to get rid of a Kinddämon is fire and spells,” the second voice told him as the lights went on.

Elliot’s gun switched to aim between Leather Jacket Guy’s eyes and he snarled, “What. The fuck. Was that?”

Tall Guy had his own gun out and aimed at Elliot’s head faster than should have been possible. In a calm, steady voice, Tall Guy suggested, “How about you put the gun down, Detective. I would really hate to kill you after just saving your life.”

For a few interminable seconds no one moved.

George reached out slowly to push Elliot’s arm down, pressed up all along his back as he murmured, “It’s okay, El, we’re fine now. I’m safe and we’re fine. You can put the gun down.”

Elliot did so reluctantly and found Tall Guy echoing his actions. Neither of them actually put their weapons down or out of reach.

Leather Jacket Guy clapped his hands together, the sound sharp and jarring, and said, “Okie dokey then. Intros all around. I’m Dean, that’s Sam, and you’re not quite out of the woods yet. Got any coffee around here? Tracking a Kinddämon is usually a day job and I am so off-kilter. Sammy, relax. The man’s had a shock. Put the piece away or use it, all right already?”

Sam glared over at Dean, but flicked on the safety and pushed the gun in the back of his pants.

“I think coffee’s a good idea,” George said quietly. “Except the racket is probably about to bring the entire NYPD down on the apartment.”

Dean grinned and told him, “Nah. Good thing about a Kinddämon is they have this cone of silence thing going on. No shoe phones, but hey, can’t win them all, right? We’re almost sure it’s because they operate in urban areas. Can’t do much hunting if your prey screams bloody murder and brings the cops in every time, right?”

George took Elliot’s hand and gently pulled the gun from it, setting it on the nightstand table before drawing him into the living room. On the trip there, Elliot suddenly got that they could both be dead at that very moment if not for the interference of complete strangers. He jerked George back by their hands and wrapped his arms around the smaller man. Shaking in delayed reaction, he held tight to his lover and pressed his face to George’s throat for several long minutes.

Their guests didn’t say anything or stick around to watch. By the time George had put Elliot back together again, the boys were comfortably ensconced in their kitchen with the coffeemaker going and a can of coke for each of them in the meantime.

Leaning against the counter, arms crossed, Elliot ordered, “Explain.”

Scratching a hand through longish brown hair, Sam replied, “A Kinddämon is thought to have originated in Germany, back in the second century B.C., in the Cimbri tribe. It’s had different names over the centuries, but the stories remain the same. Demons who take the shape of children to lure their prey out into the darkness. They feed on humans, maybe animals too, no one’s ever actually asked one about their eating habits. Anyhow, they immobilize their prey much like a snake does and then just…feed. Nothing is left save a husk which dissipates into dust. And then it starts all over again.”

Elliot’s brain hurt at the explanation, and yet, he couldn’t deny those yellow eyes or his immobility. Nothing could have moved him. Nothing had, not even George, and his lover had tried hard enough to leave bruises. He asked, “Why me?”

“Probably because you were at the last crime scene,” Dean answered.

Elliot frowned. “Why not Liv? She was there too. Or any of the other techs.”

Sam and Dean exchanged a look and Sam asked, “Do you have children, Detective?”

Fear slammed into his gut and he demanded, “Are they okay? Will this thing go after them?”

Dean shook his head and replied, “They’re safe. It’s dead now. Can’t say there aren’t more of the little bastards hanging around somewhere, but it’s all good for now.”

Elliot let out a shaky breath and looked over at where George sat at the kitchen table. He was very still, hands folded perfectly together on the Formica. Walking over, he gripped his lover’s shoulders, feeling them jump under his hands, and started massaging at the knots of tension. For their guests, he asked, “What did you mean, this isn’t over if the thing is dead?”

Shrugging, Dean countered, “You think you’re just going to go back to your job after this?”

Elliot opened his mouth to say of course he would and then had to close it again.

With a slow nod of sympathy, Dean told him, “It happens that way for all of us. Well, usually an actual death occurs and that’s how hunters start up, but I think you’re already a hunter of sorts, aren’t you?”

“Hunter?” and for the first time, George’s voice was sharp, almost angry. “Elliot is a detective. A police officer. He’s not some…vigilante!”

Elliot’s hands squeezed his appreciation for the support.

Dean just shrugged again. “Semantics. Look. You can put your blinders back on or not, whatever, no skin off our nose. But. If you can’t, we’ll give you our cell for when you’ve got more questions.”

They left before the coffee had even finished, but then, Elliot suddenly had the thought that maybe it hadn’t been for them in the first place. He’d taken the paper from Sam and walked them out of the apartment, watching them stand just a little too close to be just friends.

Unfolding the paper, he found hastily scrawled instructions as well as a phone number.

  1. use salt across entryways and windows, it keeps out spirits and demons.
  2. find a rosary and get it blessed, keep some holy water on hand, just in case.
  3. rocksalt in a shotgun will disperse a ghost, but you have to find the corpse, salt and burn it to destroy it
  4. holy ground really is sacred. worst comes to worst, find a church and hide out while you call us. We’ll always show up, but it might take a while. Dean doesn’t fly.

It occurred to him then that he hadn’t even asked for their last names.

I’ll hunt down info on them tomorrow. There has to be something, somewhere, on them. Jesus, I’m wiped, he thought fuzzily, walking back to where George still sat at the table.

Sitting in the chair beside his lover, Elliot took the other man’s hand in his and kissed the back of it.

George’s head canted at him and he asked softly, “What are you going to do?”

Elliot thought about it for a long moment and then said, “Go back to sleep. Let’s pull out the sofa.”

Because there was no way he was sleeping on that bed ever again. They would toss it the next day and he’d get Father Reynolds to perform a blessing on the apartment directly after. He went to find salt, knowing he wouldn’t sleep without at least some sense of security.

As he poured the salt across the windowsill, George looking on with a scowl, Elliot looked out at the suddenly unfamiliar city and wondered what else was out there.