Chapter Text
The scene he walked into was ghastly, but Dean hadn’t really expected otherwise. The dead woman lay on her back in the dirt beneath the branches of a towering oak tree, eyes frozen open and red blood trailing from green lips. The something perched between her spread legs had torn open her abdomen with its teeth and pulled out a bloody, screaming baby.
“Put it down, now,” Dean ordered. He kept his gun on the monster, but couldn’t shoot it with the baby so close.
It didn’t listen, but shuffled out from underneath the shadow of the branches, still hunched over the baby. In the light, Dean saw four limbs, two eyes and sharp incisors in a mouth smeared with gore. Its skin was rough and striated like tree bark, and—except for the red on its face—dappled green and brown.
“Hello Dean Winchester,” it said. Its voice was eerie, pitched like a woman’s and rough like a chronic smoker’s. Though its pronunciation was clear, the last syllables of his name trailed, as if it ran out of breath.
Dean tensed. That was not a good sign. Monsters smart enough to imitate human language were smart enough to plan, and Dean didn’t need his Dad to tell him that his research had some massive fucking gaps. Worse, it knew his name, so it probably knew where he was staying and that he was on his own and, fuck, this was going to get very fucking ugly.
The thing looked at him steadily. “Our child would have died, if I had not pulled it from the womb.”
Dean felt like he was going to vomit, there were so many things wrong with that statement. “Your child,” he said incredulously. Indicating the dead woman, he asked “What the hell did you do to her?”
Still looking straight at him, it said “Not ours and hers. Ours and yours.”
And then: “Come meet your daughter.”
The first thing Dean did after getting out of the forest was rob a baby store. It was dark by this point and the place was deserted, so it was the work of minutes to disable the alarm and cameras. Clothes, diapers, wipes, carrying sling, bottles, special newborn formula—he wasn’t sure if the extra $11 per package made a difference, but screw it, it wasn’t like he was paying anyways—all went into a large duffel bag.
It's a lie, it’s a lie, it’s a lie, he chanted in his head as he worked. Shit, that poor woman was probably missing from a hospital, and any minute a grieving husband and a pack of police officers were going to bust him with a bloody baby and then he’d be doing life for kidnapping and murder.
Dean had left the woman’s body where he found it, no salt, fire or burial. He’d regretted that even before he’d left, but the baby was still crying and naked and it was getting cold. He hoped that her ghost would understand, wouldn’t fault him for choosing to wrap her kid up in his leather jacket and high-tailing it to safety. He hoped he wouldn’t be back here in a few years with lighter fluid and matches.
He strode past, and then strode back to a shelf with soft, plush animals and shoved a purple elephant into the duffel.
It’s a lie, Dean thought. But what if it isn’t? That was the doubt that stopped him from dropping the baby off at the nearest hospital and speeding away as fast as Baby would go.
The kid looked human enough. Dean wasn’t exactly an expert on newborns, but she looked pretty much like the babies on Dr. Sexy, just maybe a bit runtier and more pissed off. But if she wasn’t, there was no way he could just leave her with unsuspecting civilians.
And then there was the other thing Dean was trying very hard not to think about. The baby couldn’t be his. No matter what that thing had done to that woman, Dean had definitely never seen her before this night. Dean had it on pretty damn solid fucking authority that dick in pussy was a pre-requisite to baby making. Although… he always used condoms, and he’d had some—okay, fine, a lot—of hookups, which he had exactly zero shame about, except it made it pretty easy to go through his trash…
…And now he was thinking about how a monster could have stolen his jizz, Jesus fuck. He brutally cut off this train of thought before it did permanent damage and finished his looting.
What he needed were answers. He knew with unshakeable certainty that he would see it again. A monster didn’t just leave their kid with a hunter for no reason.
Dean couldn’t find a car seat that looked like it would work with the Impala—fuck, when were car seats even invented? —so when he drove off, it was with the baby cradled in his lap.
The drive to Sioux Falls was nine hours. On his own, Dean could have knocked it out in a day, no problem. Unfortunately, the kid needed to eat and poop every two hours and started wailing if she thought Dean wasn’t paying her enough attention. He ended up dragging the trip out to three days, just to spare his ear drums.
On the plus side, nobody seemed to be chasing them. No missing persons reports, no news reports about a grisly murder, no police cars patrolling the highway out of town. It was frankly suspicious, and something else he needed to research when he got to Bobby’s.
It was definitely a good thing, though, because the sheer amount of attention the baby got would have made it impossible to hide. Diner waitresses and motel clerks cooed over her the entire way, even when she was alien-faced and banshee screaming. Dean kept his story as straightforward as he could— “just taking my daughter to see her grandfather” and “yeah, it’s just us, her mother isn’t in the picture”—and still scored more phone numbers and free pie than he normally would have in three months.
One overly tenacious waitress kept walking by to pet the kid’s fuzzy blonde hair while Dean was feeding her, making him eye her suspiciously and slide further into the booth. He figured this was how goats felt when being stalked by Chupacabra, and surreptitiously chucked salt at her. Just in case.
In the early evenings, he’d park them at a motel and read aloud from the copy of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care he’d stolen. His captive audience made a good attempt at Sam’s bitchface.
“Sorry kiddo, I get that it’s boring, but this was all I bothered to steal,” Dean said. “I haven’t bothered with this stuff since Sammy was a baby, and anyways, I wasn’t taking care of him when he was as shrimpy as you.” The baby spat on his shoulder, then scrunched up her face in preparation to cry. “Hey, hey, no need to cry over it,” he tried cajolingly. “You’ll be thanking me when you don’t get diaper rash.”
Dean had started monologuing on day two, after he’d driven an entire day with her crying piteously in the background. He just didn’t feel right ignoring a crying person, even if said person was incapable of speech and possibly not a human. He would have felt embarrassed—hell, he did feel embarrassed—except that all those waitresses and receptionists found it panty-droppingly hot.
Not that he could have taken any of them up on it, what with the kiddo needing him constantly. “You’re just a tiny Catch-22, aren’t you?” he told the baby, staring at the latest waitress’ ass after his third coffee refill. The baby just snuffled, and Dean pretended he didn’t find that adorable.
The nights were the longest. She was waking up almost every two hours to eat, so Dean tried to keep her on the mattress beside him for easy access. But sometimes she would get too agitated to sleep, so he’d lay her on his chest, arm curled around her back so she couldn’t roll off, and let her listen to his heartbeat. Her body was a soft, comforting weight that he hadn’t felt since Sam stopped crawling into his bed, that he hadn’t realized he’d missed. He’d hold himself unnaturally still not to wake her.
When Dean finally pulled into Singer Salvage Yard, it was with a makeshift car seat rigged into the backseat—“Sorry, Baby, I’ll make it up to you,” Dean had said, wincing as the seat tore at the Impala’s upholstery—throw up on every single one of his shirts, a kid who’d been working herself into a rage for the last ten miles and a purple elephant watching him judgementally from the backseat.
“What the—?” Bobby, who’d met them outside, looked at the baby, then looked at Dean’s bloodshot eyes, and asked, “Who the hell did you knock up, you idjit?”
Bobby was silent for a long time after Dean’s explanation, his beer forgotten on the kitchen table. Finally, he asked, “Have you called your father, Dean?”
Dean looked away. Thing was, he knew he should have called Dad right away. Whatever was going on, Dean knew in his gut it was going to be big. A little backup would have been awesome. But John Winchester was an uncompromising man who saw everything supernatural as a threat. He and Sam used to get into fights about that, with Sam arguing that supernatural wasn’t the same as evil, and Dad retorting that they didn’t have time to put the fucking poltergeist on trial before it killed somebody else. Dean was never completely sure if Sam really believed that, or if he just didn’t want to believe something that Dad believed. Though he’d never been dumb enough to get involved in that argument, if asked four days ago, Dean would have sided with Dad.
On his lap, the kid was blowing spit bubbles, finally happy after a diaper change and a bottle. Dean spent a moment noticing just how tiny her fingernails were, before shaking his head. “Bobby… If it’s true, you know what Dad would say,” Dean said.
When he and Sammy were learning to shoot, they’d set up targets using whatever garbage they could find—old cans, rotten fruit, broken dolls, anything that wouldn’t ricochet. Dean thought about setting her up like that—putting her on an out of the way ledge, taking aim at forty, maybe fifty yards to test his range—and he just couldn’t. He didn’t think he could have done it three days ago, and he knew for sure he couldn’t do it now. Bracing himself for Bobby’s judgement, Dean continued, “Even if it is true, I don’t think I can kill—”
“Son, lemme stop you there,” Bobby interrupted. “I ain’t John, and I can’t fault you for what you didn’t do,” he said, eyeing the baby. “You know he and I didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.”
Relaxing a bit, Dean gave a huff of laughter. “That’s putting it lightly. The last time we were here, you chased us off with a shotgun.”
“I chased him off,” Bobby corrected. “You and your brother can stick around.”
“You didn’t hear? Sam’s off at college, been there two years now,” Dean said.
“I heard,” Bobby said, looking keenly at Dean. “But that doesn’t mean he ain’t still welcome here.”
“Thanks Bobby,” Dean said around a lump in his throat. It must have been the sleep deprivation, but he felt pathetically grateful to have Bobby Singer in his life.
“So has she done anything unusual?” Bobby asked from the doorway while Dean gave the kid a bath in the sink. Hilariously, it turned out that Bobby was one of those people who were afraid that babies would deflate if you breathed on them too hard, so he kept a wide margin around her at all times. Since Bobby hadn’t even once complained about the crying, Dean refrained from making fun of him about it, but he did get a kick out of plopping her down on Bobby’s lap when he least expected it. So far, the record was twenty-three minutes before Bobby’s panicked swearing got Dean to retrieve her.
“Not according to Dr. Spock,” Dean replied.
“Who?”
“He’s the author of—never mind,” Dean said quickly. “The point is, Baby’s doing perfectly normal baby things. Aren’t you, Baby?” That last bit was directed at the kid, since his new narrating habit hadn’t died off even with an adult around to talk to. Bobby got a weird look on his face whenever he caught Dean doing it, but whatever, it was supposed to be good for her language development. He drew a hard line a baby talk, though. Mostly.
To Bobby, he added, “Haven’t noticed any fangs, glowing eyes, or murdered woodland creatures.”
“Huh,” Bobby said.
Dean looked up. “What does that mean?” Then, figuring it out, he demanded, “What did you find out?”
Bobby rubbed his hand across his mouth. “One of my contacts found the mother, pulled her medical file. Her name was Maria Rossi.” Staring at the kid, Bobby continued, “Dean, she was a cancer patient. She’d had a full hysterectomy couple years ago. She couldn’t have had a baby. Shouldn’t have been able to carry it.”
Dean felt his heartbeat pick up, but kept his voice steady. He lifted Baby out of the sink and patted her dry, working around her flailing limbs. “So what does that mean?” he asked again.
“It means, we gotta find somebody to ask,” Bobby said steadily. “Found out what that thing you saw was.” He flipped open a book to show Dean a woodcut of a monster with bark-like skin stepping into the trunk of a tree.
“That’s it,” Dean said sharply.
“It’s a dryad,” Bobby said, “a tree spirit. The good news is, they can be found wherever trees are found. That’s also the bad news.”
“Jesus Christ,” Dean said.
Dean and Bobby spent the next week figuring out a strategy for finding a dryad and getting information from it without getting murdered. Trying to interrogate something was turning out to be a lot harder than just shooting it and setting it on fire, which was Dean’s usual (and preferred) approach.
Dean could do research and planning, he just didn’t like it, so when he and Dad and Sam were still together, he’d been happy enough to leave it to his giant nerd of a baby brother. Now though, he was even less helpful than usual. He didn’t know how since she slept eighteen hours a day, but Baby absorbed every waking moment of his life, and some of the sleeping ones.
He and Baby were sharing Bobby’s guest room. Baby had her own empty-drawer-slash-crib, so she was mostly sleeping alone now, but Dean still got up about a million times a night. In a way, it was almost worse—he kept stubbing his toe or tripping over air when he’d jerk out of bed at her cries. The elephant with its stupid purple fur and stupid beady eyes mocked him every time. Dean wished he’d stolen a less hypercritical animal.
Bobby, the coward, was no help at all. He ran away every time he heard so much as a hint of a cry. Dean begrudgingly accepted that he’d be constantly covered in puke.
All together, they’d been at Bobby’s for just shy of three weeks before they had a working plan: they’d need a bunch of herbs, torches, some chanting, tree sap— “Seriously? Can’t we just buy maple syrup?” Dean asked. “Shut your mouth and hand me that tree tap, boy,” Bobby replied—and the light of the full moon. Simple.
And then Dean got up one Thursday morning after a night of fitful not-sleeping to check if the tarp he’d pulled over Baby—the car, not the kid—was still in place. As he blearily turned to head back inside, noticed Bobby’s front door and froze. Something had carved deep into the wood a set of coordinates, and a date: May 2nd. Sam’s birthday.
Shit.