"I want so much to open your eyes" (snow patrol)

[starandrea]

This was going to be a much harsher story, but I read something terrifyingly depressing right before I started it writing it and I knew then that the werewolf AU would have to be super fluffy to make up for it. The practical upshot of this is that instead of fighting at the beginning, they fight at the end.

Unrelatedly, the angels were supposed to represent a third gender in this story, but I couldn’t find room to make it matter to the plot.

Bingo square #6: "Fantasy & Supernatural, werewolves"
(All prompts from au_bingo ~ custom card.)


Double Lines of Dominance

It took him a second to shake off the disorientation and the darkness. Maybe a few seconds. The whole world seemed larger now, and closer, more wild and a little frightening when he reached out and nothing moved the way he thought it should. “Jo,” he whispered.

Or he tried to. It came out as a whine. He didn’t move again, didn’t try to talk, just stared through startled eyes at the shadows all around him. Living shadows. He wasn’t stupid: he was surrounded by things that were very much alive, but he’d lay money that none of them were human.

He’d know if they were demons. Sam took some comfort in that. He thought he’d know if they were angels, but he couldn’t be sure of that. As his eyes adjusted, he could tell they weren’t angel-shaped. It didn’t mean much, but it might explain why he had paws instead of hands.

“Jo,” he said again. This time it came out more understandably, but still nothing like his actual voice.

There was no answer.

Gabriel, he thought, because he’d promised not to call just because he was confused. What the fuck.

Sam managed to extricate himself from the group – and it was a group – of prone but breathing forms. Sleeping forms. Let sleeping dogs lie, he thought, with something that could slide uncomfortably close to hysteria if he wasn’t careful. He managed to get out of the circle before his breath shuddered out of him: a distressed sort of woof that only confirmed what he was seeing.

He was only a few feet away from what looked like a pack of wolves. And, if what he could see of himself was any indication, he belonged with them. He and Gabriel were going to have to have a talk about turning him into anything not human.

“Hey,” Dean said, and his head swung in a way that was definitely not natural. Not Dean’s voice, but Dean. He’d recognize his brother anywhere –

And this was proof, because the lupine form prowling down the hillside toward him could not have formed the word “hey.” But Sam had heard it, and he’d recognized it, and he lowered his head in greeting instinctively. Wolf Dean walked right into him, shoulder brushing against his, muzzle sliding over his back, and Sam turned into it without thinking.

“You okay?” Dean asked.

Sam swallowed, following when Dean sat back on his haunches, and Dean let himself be pushed over with something that could have been a laugh. Sam rolled to the ground beside him, still not thinking, because he remembered with vivid clarity the last time Dean had hugged him. And he shouldn’t. Hugs from Dean should blur together into some kind of daily comfort and they just didn’t, lately. Too few, too far between, too sorely missed for Sam to do anything but take this contact when it was offered.

“Hey,” Dean repeated. It wasn’t a protest. It wasn’t anything like a protest, so Sam just pressed harder against him as he said, “We should stay a few more days, right?”

“Yeah,” Sam muttered. He buried his face in Dean’s fur, and it wasn’t even weird when he closed his eyes.

“Really?” Dean sounded a little surprised. “What about work?”

Work, Sam thought? For wolves?

“Don’t care,” he mumbled, since Dean seemed to be waiting for an answer.

“’Kay.” Dean clearly wasn’t going to argue, and a distant part of Sam’s mind thought that was probably his cue. He and Dean balanced each other, so if Dean wanted to stay, Sam should probably be listing the reasons they shouldn’t.

There were only two problems with that: Sam didn’t know what the reasons were, and he really didn’t care.

Dean rolled on top of him, licked his face, and pushed himself up. And up. His wolf outline dissolved in the light of dawn, replaced by the more familiar Dean-shape Sam had known forever. “Want some breakfast?”

Sam stared. Gabriel, he thought again. What the fuck.

So they were shapeshifters, apparently. And Jo wasn’t with them. Sam wasn’t sure which one alarmed him more. Okay, missing Jo alarmed him more, but it wasn’t like werewolves had a lot of good memories for him. He was trying to distract himself by figuring out where the hell they were camping when the rest of the “pack” started to peel itself awake.

Bobby. Not paralyzed, four functioning legs that turned to two when he tried to take responsibility for breakfast from Dean. Adam, which made Sam’s throat tighten, and he ground his teeth to keep from shouting for Gabriel the second he saw him. Ash, which was weird in a way Sam couldn’t quite figure out.

And Gabriel. Again. Sam didn’t know if an archangel pretending to be a wolf would have wings, but given the jokes Dean made about Zachariah he’d guess the answer was yes. This Gabriel didn’t have any, even when he changed into his human form. Also present were Jophiel and Sach, but their wingless human forms were unexpectedly male and Sam had no idea how he recognized them.

Cas, finally. The last one up, and the one who looked least happy about camping, and he refused to shift until Dean dripped maple syrup on coat. Unfolding into his human guise, Castiel gave Dean a baleful look that was mollified only by more syrup and a lot of pancakes. Sam tried not to mind that Cas sat on the other side of Dean and made him push over far enough that he was pressed up against Sam again, because maybe that made it harder to eat but they were staying, weren’t they?

Castiel didn’t like to camp, but Sam wanted to stay. So they were staying. It was a petty thing to find satisfaction in, but Sam wasn’t feeling very magnanimous lately.

He was also feeling more and more creeped out by Jo’s absence. Not least because there was an obvious gender bias at their camp, and he was sure he would have noticed it if it had happened before. Gabriel, he thought, just in case the archangel could actually hear him. Where’s Jo.

He didn’t get an answer, of course.

Dean took Cas out of the park for a supply run after breakfast, and Sam was a little surprised when the rest of them just melted into the trees. They’d stuck pretty close together overnight, but when he looked away from the road he found Jophiel already gone. He saw Bobby and Sach loping off toward the woods. He caught Ash, still in human form, crashing in a hammock, so at least some things stayed constant.

What he didn’t see was Gabriel – not until he went to make sure the fire was out, and he almost tripped over Wolf Gabriel’s sprawling form. “Hi, Sam,” he drawled, and how he did that when he was a wolf Sam would never know. “Wanna go swimming?”

He hesitated, but yeah. Swimming actually sounded okay. And it was a dream, right? Or a... thing? A not real thing? This place wasn’t real, Gabriel wasn’t real, and Sam wasn’t really a werewolf. He thought if he wanted to swim, after all this, maybe he was allowed.

“Yeah,” he said. For a moment, he wondered if he had swim trunks, but then he realized Gabriel probably meant as a wolf.

Okay. That was fine. Weird, but he wasn’t... against it, exactly.

He should be. Maybe that was the dream, or something. The same way he recognized Jophiel and Sach, the same way he didn’t freak when Wolf Dean licked his face, maybe there were things about the scenario he just accepted. Despite his totally not awesome history.

It was easier to follow Gabriel on four legs than on two. And strangely, that was how Sam finally recognized the campground. The fallen trees in the river triggered a distant memory, a brochure Jess had kept on her desk for months: Yellowstone. They were at Tower Fall in Yellowstone.

Or near it, anyway. Sam was pretty sure the actual campground would have other humans – or any humans – and this one definitely didn’t. But he knew this river.

“Dare you to dunk your head!” Gabriel called, and he shook himself.

“I’ll dunk yours!” Sam retorted, stumbling a little on the bank and splashing heavily in when he thought too much about what his legs were doing. He was still tall, for a wolf, and there were four of them.

“You’re welcome to try!” Gabriel wasn’t nearly far enough away when he issued that challenge. Sam blundered after him, eating ground even in the water, and Gabriel spent too much time looking over his shoulder. Sam grinned as he lurched into the other wolf, sending him splashing to one side with sheer mass.

Disadvantage of being unangelic, he thought. Gabriel was tiny when he didn’t have the unstoppable force of heaven behind him. Sam had stopped noticing how much of his height the wings made up until they weren’t there anymore.

He felt something clamp around his back leg and he went down with a sputter. He was trying to laugh when he forced his head back above water, but apparently wolves didn’t like to get quite so thoroughly drenched. It wasn’t easy to fight down the panic until Gabriel pressed an apology into his side and shoved him, not coincidentally, toward calmer water.

“I can never tell,” Sam said, trying not to choke again. “When you’re being a jerk to be a jerk, and when you’re being a jerk because you don’t know how to be nice.”

Gabriel sounded amused as they sloshed into the shallows and looked around: Sam for something clean enough to drink, and Gabriel for who-knew-what. “I’m not pulling your pigtails, Sam.”

“Dean’s in charge,” Sam said, because that was a certainty in his mind.

“And Castiel’s his bitch,” Gabriel agreed amiably.

Sam was pretty sure Cas wouldn’t appreciate that characterization, but it spoke to his point. “So what do you want? I know you don’t want to be second to Cas.”

Gabriel snorted. “Like Michael would have me. Eventually I’d run out of tricks, and he’d run out of patience. And when I say ‘eventually’ I mean ‘in a week.’”

A creepy kind of dream scenario was sneaking up on Sam. He could see it coming, so it wasn’t doing a great job at stealth. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to voice the thought himself.

“I’m not taking you either,” he said, because this wasn’t real. He didn’t know why he was worrying about it. “You’re my friend, Gabriel. I like hanging out with you, but you can’t have my rank.”

He’d meant place. His place with Dean. Only after it came out as “rank” did he realize that might be more appropriate.

If Dean was the pack’s alpha, then it was a pretty safe bet that Cas was his mate and Sam was his second. His beta.

The same rank Gabriel would gain by association if he started courting Sam.

Sam did know things about wolves. He’d just never thought the need for that knowledge would be so... immediate.

“We’re not friends,” Gabriel said. “You and me, Sam, we’re partners. We’re co-commanders of an angelic garrison. And I need you to focus on what that means for the garrison, not on how lonely and emo it makes your pathetic excuse for a social life.”

Sam bared his teeth as comprehension crashed home. It might be a wolf instinct but right now he liked it a lot. Because of course the trickster could suppress his angelic form if he wanted to. Of course he could look human, like anything he wanted, even enough to fool Sam’s slightly more-than-human senses. His brother had offered to do it for Cas, hadn’t he?

It was suddenly very clear that Gabriel had been toying with him.

“We are not,” Sam snapped, “co-commanders. I’m in charge. If your ego can’t take it, I think you can find better ways to sulk than jerking me around in your stupid reindeer games.”

Gabriel’s wings burst free even as he shifted, and Sam was standing up right in front of him because he did have a height advantage and if Gabriel was going to fuck around then he could damn well use it.

“Bring Jo back,” Sam snarled. “Right now. Or I’m shouting for Samael.”