Chapter Text
Dean Winchester hates witches.
The sentiment might come off harsh. Dean is a hunter of the supernatural, but witches are—allegedly—human. Sam would probably go on to add that witches are women, by and large, and that it’s not progressive to say that, if given the option, Dean would press any big red button that promised to wipe out all witches if pressed. It might even be a widely frowned upon idea, even if it is just an idea.
Besides, Dean wouldn’t, if it came down to it. He’s got witch friends. He likes Rowena—kind of. Sammy has a knack for magic, and he gets a pass. While neither of them are—as far as Dean is concerned—Glinda the Good Witch, they haven’t pulled anything too heinous—at least not anything that warrants a death sentence. Probably.
Dean likes women (a lot), and he likes humans (less), and he absolutely prefers to not kill them under normal circumstances. Even when they do weird slimy witch shit.
But now, here he is, under abnormal circumstances. And he kinda wishes that witches as a concept didn’t exist. Maybe that’s a severe judgement to dole out on an entire group of people but in Dean’s defense—
This is the most fucked up passive-aggressive witch’s curse Dean has ever heard of in his nearly forty years of life.
The way it all starts is that Cas has, once again, fucked off.
Last Dean heard, Cas is somewhere in Syria hunting down the (or a?) tree of life. Dean has been sending text messages which Cas probably hasn’t been receiving because there’s a total of seven continents and Cas has decided he’d rather be on any of the other six. Also, Dean will die before he prays to Cas over trivial crap like this.
Trivial crap like Sam lamenting, “I bet Cas would be able to tell us if there’s anyone else in that house.”
Sam and Dean are sitting in the Impala across the street of a small house in Pennsylvania. It has a peach stucco exterior, a busted mailbox, and only one storey above the basement. The occupants’ have a shoddy hand-painted sign planted out front that titles the squat building a nail salon. It is not a nail salon. Or, at least, it hasn’t been one for some time.
There’s a number of witches that live here, though Sam and Dean don’t know what that number is. They think three, but it’s tough to tell. And they don’t know if it’s just the witches in there, or if they’ve got customers over.
Sam is right about Cas, but it was Cas’s choice to fuck off, and they don’t need him anyway, especially not to hunt which they have been doing their whole damn lives.
It’s just.
It’s just that Cas died seven months ago, and came back six months after that. So, when he’s out of sight, he’s not out of mind. Not for Dean, and apparently not even for Sam.
Dean’s hunted without Cas before Cas died, and he’s hunted without him since. But now that he’s back, apparently, Dean can’t help but … well … he worries about the guy. Thinks about him more than he probably should. There might be entire oceans between them, but Dean still carries worry like a thorn in his paw, even though there’s not anything Dean can do for Cas, or vice versa, even if Cas wanted anything done.
But, Cas is fine. Dean is fine. And, not knowing the precise numbers of witches—that’s fine, too.
So, Dean takes a quick breath for himself and says, “Ain’t like they’re ghouls. Judging by the cars out front, it’s just the witches.”
There are two cars that have been here, unmoving, all day—a blue pickup, rusted down to its tailpipe, that has seen better decades, and an older but nonetheless more intact Honda Civic which is a mess inside with parking tickets, food wrappers, and undefined debris.
Dean knocks the Impala’s steering wheel with his palm for emphasis.
“I say, we go in there now.”
“And what?” Sam is always skeptical. “Oh, I know,” he says, tapping his nose knowledgably, mockingly, a new habit Sam’s picked up to be strategically annoying. “Rough ‘em up? Tell ‘em what for?”
Here’s what’s good about hunting with Cas—he trusts Dean’s intuition and doesn’t hassle him over every little thing.
“Maybe just tell ‘em that we’re gonna rough ‘em up, if they don’t stop hexing people.” Two birds.
“Dean, we are not gonna rough them up. We’re not gonna even threaten that—who are we, the mob?”
Dean just really doesn’t like witches. They’ve been sitting out there all day, monitoring the coming and goings of the building’s inhabitants (they haven’t been coming or going much) and now evening is settling into night and Dean is craving dinner. Sue him for being a bit impatient. If Sam doesn’t wanna rough up a few witches, Dean will do his share.
Dean considers. Purses his lips. He tosses Sam a smarmy smile.
“Maybe we should ask ‘em to do our nails.”
If Sam ever learns how to roll his eyes harder, he’ll give himself an aneurism.
“Whatever,” he grumbles, jamming his hand into the doorhandle, and shoving himself out of the Impala.
Dean hefts to his feet, ready for action.
Looking across the street now, Dean sees night falling, the darkening light beginning to be outcompeted by the brassy glow of sodium streetlamps. Lights inside the houses around them are turning on one by one, candles in the dark. It gets infinitely spookier, somehow, now that it’s night.
The witches—they’ve been making their name by doing what amounts to the magical version of gender confirmation surgery. That in itself is fine. Good, even.
But the only way Dean and Sam ever heard of them in the first place was their hexing people. Doing messed up things to their body—screwing with their size, or their skin, adding and taking away limbs—escalating until the point that a local in the know had started to draw up a pattern, which they passed along the hunter grapevine. Sam and Dean had been rolling through the area, so the case fell to them.
The people being messed with by the witches—Sam says most of them were shitheads. Transphobic, homophobic, the gamut. Dean can’t get too sad about that.
The local, a kid named Billi going to college nearby, was the one who confided in a hunter. The witches had hexed their brother-in-law to have a nice rack. Their male brother-in-law—a guy—a guy who hadn’t originally had a rack of any kind, nice or otherwise, presumably.
Billi didn’t like their brother-in-law, but revenge wasn’t something they had asked for. The witches had just taken the liberty.
And yeah. No one had died yet, as far as Sam had been able to dig up, and one day Billi’s brother-in-law woke up with the world’s fastest top surgery results, but Dean doesn’t really trust things to stay like that. He doesn’t really trust people, much less witches. Things like this are prone to escalation, and witches … witches really creep Dean out.
“Maybe we should come back tomorrow,” Dean says. He gets an uneasy feeling, looking up at the little nail salon that is not a nail salon.
“Wow, I thought you were gonna rough ‘em up, tough guy. Go ten rounds with your brass knuckles.” Such a jackass.
“Oh, shut up.”
Disbelieving scoff. “You shut up.”
“Well, ladies,” someone speaks up from behind them, sending a shiver along Dean’s back.
He spins around, and recognizes one of the witches, half-lit in the night. She’s got her arms folded, and a half-pitying half-disdainful expression on her face.
“Seems like we have ourselves some peeping toms.”
Suddenly, Dean and Sam are yanked up into the air by their ankles, strung up like carcasses at a slaughterhouse. Dean scrambles, almost drops his gun. He shoves his hand in his pocket to keep his gun from falling as all his blood floods down to his skull.
Sam sputters, defensive. Tall enough that his hair has flopped over his face and is glancing across the ground as he swings, struggling. “We weren’t peeping!”
“Whatever,” one of the witches says.
She’s got buzzed green hair and a ring the size of a bracelet strung through her nose. From upside-down, she looks unrecognizably abstract and fairly unimpressed.
“Why are you spying on us?” another witch asks. This one has long, stringy blonde hair clumping down her back, and tattoos of horoscope symbols over her bony collar.
Sam mutters something in Latin or Greek, and he and Dean fall again, Dean barely managing to block himself with his arms from landing straight on his skull. He bangs his elbow, though.
Back on solid ground, Dean pulls his gun on the witch closest to him.
“This!” he yells. “This shit, you’ve gotta quit pulling shit like this!”
Sam tries to get Dean to quit aiming his gun at them—not like it’s loaded anyway.
He says, hand on Dean’s wrist, earnest and doe-eyed, “Relying on magic to solve all of your problems is a slippery slope.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” one of the women says scornfully, folding her arms, “You’re a man, you don’t have to rely on magic at all to get what you want!”
Sam purses his mouth, ready to argue or concede, but not knowing where to begin. On the other hand, Dean’s had enough.
“The shit you’ve been pulling, you’ve got to stop,” he comes back to the central premise. “You’ve been causing too much trouble. If we were able to find you guys, other people will too, and they won’t be as nice as we are.” Or, at least as nice as Sam is.
“Hunters,” one of the witches realizes. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”
“Fuck,” says the other, blue-haired. Dean hadn’t realized hair dye came in this many colours.
“Hey, hey,” green-hair says, “We’ve been ready for this. Jay, take your car, we’ll take the other one.”
“Hey, hang on, you can’t just pick up shop and move somewhere else,” Dean points out.
But they seem pretty determined to do just that, ignoring the brothers as they split up between their two vehicles, keys jangling.
“We can’t just let you go,” Sam adds, on the same page as Dean for once.
Dean calls behind them as one of them slams their car door. “We’ll find you! ‘Hunters’—it’s kind of in the name!”
One of them, the witch with blue hair, now sat in the driver’s seat of the Civic, rolls down the window, face bloodying with anger.
“Oh, fuck you!” she yells out. “See how you like being a persecuted gender minority, you white sack of shit!” Dean is white, he is a sack of shit, but he feels offended anyway.
The blue-haired witch sticks her tongue out of her mouth like she’s twelve, two hands raised in the air with middle fingers propped high. Stupidly, Dean thinks she should watch the road, and also that her nails are so long they’ve gotta be fake so maybe the nail salon thing wasn’t a total cover, and while he’s thinking all of that, out of nowhere, all the muscles in his body contract like he’s accidentally seized a live wire.
And then, just as shockingly painful and sudden, his strength releases, and he falls like a bowling pin to the ground for the second time in one day, asphalt skimming his palms.
“Dean, you okay?” Sam calls out, sprinting over, witches forgotten. They peel away in their cars, rubber burning as their tires whimper and squeal.
Sam reaches down and yanks Dean back to his feet by a firm grip at his elbow. And Dean goes, easy, a puppet picked up by its strings. He feels nauseous.
“Define ‘okay’,” someone says.
Or, it’s gotta be somebody else, someone new, because that’s not Dean’s voice.
“Sam?” Dean asks. That stranger’s voice asks. Funny, because it sounds close, like it’s coming from his own skull. Calling from inside the house.
Sam’s eyes go wide.
Dean tries again. “Sammy?”
Fuck.
“Dean?” Sam asks, and he sounds … uncertain. Fuck.
“Did I … am I …” Dean realizes, and his own voice answers the question.
Dean looks down at his hands, lit up greyish beneath the twilight sky and the coppery streetlights. He doesn’t know what he expects. His hands look about the same, same size, less veiny maybe. But his arms—he thinks his forearms are narrower. He grips it, feeling for muscle, finding less than expected. The witch did something to him.
Dean looks up at Sam for answers, and he can see it reflected in Sam’s eyes.
Dean Winchester hates witches.
“We gotta go after them,” Dean says, scrambling to draw his gun again.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sam says, grabbing Dean by his now slender forearm. “Can we take five? What did they do to you?”
“You tell me!” Better yet, they ask the witches and get them to explain in painstaking detail.
Sam grasps Dean firmly by each shoulder. “Dude. Your hair.”
Dean gives up on trying to grab his gun and reaches up to swipe his hand over the back of his scalp.
Except—except he can’t. His hand gets tangled up in—
In strands of long, brown hair.
“The hell,” Dean hisses, voice coming out as a whine.
“I think she hit you with a spell,” Sam says. Genius.
“No shit, Stanford.”
“This is …” Sam’s eyes are wide, skimming over Dean’s face like he can’t figure out where to focus. “No offense,” he says quickly, breathlessly, “you look so weird.”
“Oh, thanks a bunch, dick,” Dean says, and hates his voice.
Dean can’t picture how he looks now. Long hair, skinny arms. He feels his face—barely any facial hair, not even stubble, it’s all peach fuzz. And Sam, looking at Dean like he grew an extra head.
“Are you,” Sam says quietly. “Dean, are you, uh … did she make you a woman?”
“She undid the past twenty years of t-shots, is what she did.” Realization roils in Dean’s gut. He feels a tornado of a headache roll onto the horizon.
“But, you’re still a guy,” Sam checks.
Fuck. Well, she said the curse was to make Dean a woman, hadn’t she? If ‘persecuted gender minority’ is what they’re calling women lately. Somehow, he doubts she’d intended to make him a trans guy. Because, well, been there done that.
And well. Witches are weird. Very menstrual blood, very vulva power. And then, the other half of the time, they’re all about the feminine penis and third, fourth, and fifth genders. Needless to say, it’s a tossup about whether they’re going to be very cool about trans people, or batshit. Dean’s willing to go out on a limb about this one. Especially because—a yup—whatever there is about someone that convinces them that they’re a man or they’re a woman—she hadn’t tripped that switch.
“If you start calling me Deanna, I’m going to kick your ass,” Dean says, and hears his high-pitched voice already shaking with rage about it. Internally, he laments, wondering if he can even kick Sam’s ass anymore (because he definitely always could).
“Dude, no way,” Sam says, his ‘took one Women’s Studies class’ face folding over bitchily. “I was just checking. We have to figure out what she did to you.”
What they have to do is hunt down those witches and get them, preferably at gunpoint, to fix it. Dean’s committed too many years of his life making sure he got the body he wanted to have, or as close as possible, not to have it undone because some moon power woo-woo lady with blue hair decided to Freaky Friday him into a woman’s body with long hair and skinny arms and—
“Oh fuck,” Dean realizes suddenly. Sam flinches, which maybe Dean should feel guilty about, but the realization is too busy hitting him with the force of a speeding logging truck. “God damn it!”
“Dean, what?” Sam snaps.
Dean puts one hand on his heart, feels how fast his own pulse is racing. Snug beneath the swell of what used to flatland.
“The witch gave me tits!”