tampered | Log: Ongoing

Current Mood: cautious

Log: Ongoing

When; February 16th ... ish.
Rating; Teen? Strong language at the least.
Characters; Dean [

cal_sitter]
Summary; Niko doesn't like the idea that his secrets were given away without his knowledge. Dean stops by Lux to explain what the City told him. With any luck, violence does not ensue.
Log;

Niko was not looking forward to his meeting with Dean. All the other man had been willing to tell him over the phone was the City had given him a secret involving Cal. The natural paranoia of an older brother who'd devoted twenty years to keeping the baby of the family alive and sane had Niko questioning what secret and how in depth the City had gone. There were things he knew about Cal that weren't meant to go beyond the two of them. That Cal was absent from the City didn't matter. He might return, and Niko wouldn't stop protecting him. He didn't know how.

Lux would soon be closed for the night. Niko thanked his staff for their work and helped hasten their departure by lending a hand to the clean-up efforts. He wanted to catch Dean at the entrance, and he wanted as many people gone as possible when the two of them had their conversation.

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Dean arrived at around the time specified, fifteen minutes late, mouth a grim line and hands deep in his pockets, nervous or waiting. He didn't fit in with the tired but smiling people, stragglers and employees, leaving Lux's establishment.

He wasn't much in the mood for smiling the past few days, anyway, although, true to character, he managed to force one on for most people. Most people wasn't Niko Leandros. Niko had a way of seeing through it and being more insulted than comforted, Dean felt. He wasn't like Sam, or most other people. He met most of Dean's statements with a degree of seriousness. A degree of seriousness that made flippancy seem like an insult.

Especially being this was going to be a discussion about the guy's brother. Caliban Leandros, or, Dean corrected himself, because Niko had bristled at the full name, Cal.

Dean stopped when he saw Niko at the door, blinking and raising both eyebrows and giving a shrug with his shoulders as he brushed through some of the last few people to walk up to him.

"Nik."

"Dean." Niko nodded a greeting as he settled a chair on top of its table, leaving the floor clear to be swept and mopped during the day. He didn't often smile, and he didn't summon the farce of one at his guest's appearance. It wasn't that he didn't like Dean or respect him. He simply had grown up with the knowledge that trust freely given was a weakness.

As much as he knew about the Winchester brothers, Niko was worried about how Dean had interpreted whatever the City had shown him of Cal. So many people had called his little brother a monster, and Niko had no tolerance for that viewpoint. He knew that Dean preferred the simplicity of good versus evil and human versus demon, though the hunter's experiences had forced him to recognize other possibilities.

Niko stepped back from the table and nodded in the direction of his office, polite but giving the clear impression that this wasn't a social engagement. "We can talk in the back." Once he'd determined how much Dean knew, he could move on the other issue of what the City had had to say about the elder Winchester.

It was always tense like this, Dean thought, whenever he had to have a serious conversation with another hunter, at least one that wasn't Sam. Even the Harvelles had a sore spot somewhere in them for the Winchesters. Somehow, even without the stigma of being John's Boy, Dean still felt intimidated and awkward around Niko when they were face-to-face.

He slid a silver flask from his back pocket and downed a good amount of the booze in it, knowing that the other man disapproved of the habit, in both Dean and his brother. But he needed it. Bad.

He followed, shooting one last look at the doorway out of Lux.

"Sounds good. I didn't do it on purpose. Just so you know. I did it because I'm an idiot."

Like Cal, Niko wasn't good at the friend thing. He was loyal, concerned, well-mannered, but he'd never played within the bounds of typical social structures. Dean may have spent forty years in Hell, but he was probably better-adjusted than either Leandros.

Niko didn't remark on the flask or its probable contents. As long as Dean only drank in moderation, he'd resolved not to hassle the man. He tried not to interfere in friends' or acquaintances' vices until they caused him concern.

"I know you didn't do it on purpose." He held the door to allow Dean to enter the sparsely furnished room: a desk, chairs, files organized with ruthless precision, and a sword on the wall. "That's not why I need to speak with you. You have Sam. Does that offer you insight to the source of my concern?"

Even Niko's office brought to Dean the same feelings the man's apartment did-- Spartan. It was a look her recognized well. His dad's way of life. The way Sam had been when he'd first seen him again after getting out of the hotbox. Hunters lived that way. Dean hated it.

He slid carefully past Niko, staring at the side of his face for a few seconds before sitting down in the nearest chair, expression pinched, counter to his splayed, boneless way of dropping into a seated position.

"You want to know what I learned. Felt. Whatever. Because it could cause problems for your brother. There was a gate. What's on the other side of the gate? Hell?"

"Near enough." The door swung closed and latched silently under Niko's hand. He moved not to the chair behind the desk, but to the one beside Dean. "On the other side of that gate is a place called Tumulus. It's Latin for Tomb," he said as he took a seat. "It's the world of the Auphe. It exists beside what people think of as the real world, but out of sequence with it."

Through this brief explanation, Niko maintained a businesslike facade. His description was sterlized, academic. Dean's Hell wasn't Tumulus. A single conversation with Ruby was enough to confirm that. It didn't make the realm of the Auphe seem any better to Niko. As far as he could tell, there were variations in the type or torment, not in the intensity.

"You can enter Tumulus for only a minute, and an entire day can pass in the world that humans populate. Nothing lives there but the Auphe and whatever they drag through their gates as playthings and tools."

"I know what it means," Dean muttered, but it lacked the characteristic snappishness the response usually would have had. He was too busy staring into the middle distance between the two of them, thoughts hanging on every one of Niko's words, because Dean wanted something out of this conversation. He wanted to understand, maybe. He wanted to understand Cal because maybe that would mean finally understanding Sam Winchester.

"Why would he open the gate? Why would he do that? Was it willingly? Did somebody make him? Why and how, I need to know. I saw him. It was terrifying. I was so scared I almost..."

He cut himself off, reaching for the silver bottle again, pouring more down his throat as an excuse to keep him from saying anymore words.

Drinking was, in its way, healthier than Niko's first reaction had been. "He wasn't aware that he was doing it at first. It was instinct." Emotion crept into his voice for the first time during the interview. He wouldn't say that the horror had been his own, but the evidence was in the subtle tension of his shoulders and the unsteady breath he drew before saying, "I didn't know what do, either, not until he asked me to put him down."

Niko leaned his elbows against the desk and rested his head in his hands, rubbing at his temples as if to ward off a headache. "You're the last person here I'd have wanted to see that, but you may be the safest." Cal hadn't remembered Tumulus. His mind had blocked out the information because too much had happened to him there. If anyone in the City could sympathize with what the Auphe's world meant to him and to his brother, it would be someone who'd been to Hell and whose brother trod an equally dangerous path.

"I didn't want to see it either," Dean replied quickly, interjecting the thought as it came into his mind, voice going up in pitch slightly, tight. As if if he didn't say it immediately it would never come. Here's your chance to be honest, Dean told himself. Take it. He slammed the flask down on the desk nearby, keeping it out of his hands, which wrung through his close-cropped hair.

"I didn't want to see it either, believe me. But I did. And I was scared. Because it's like...it's like what I've had nightmares about for years now. What Sam can do. What if instinct takes over. What if something happens and it's not instinct. Worst case scenario. The last thing my dad ever told me is if shit like that started to happen, I had to put Sam out of his misery."

Edited 2009-02-17 06:15 (UTC)

Niko pushed away from the desk. "I think you should fight for him first." He stood, paced across the room with the deceptively relaxed gait of a panther, and stopped in front of the sword mounted on the wall. It was a modern katana. The titatnium had once been stained with Cal's blood. "He may tell you he has a choice. He may try to kill you. Unless you're certain there's nothing left to save, you'll hate yourself for killing him first, and you'll always wonder if you murdered your little brother."

He looked over his shoulder. The smile he offered was faint but genuine and understanding. "I don't like it, but the Auphe are part of Cal. At some point I have to let him decide how best to deal with that, because I don't know how it feels. The best I can do is ensure that he has something to anchor him."

Edited 2009-02-17 06:27 (UTC)

Dean turned slightly in the chair, meeting Niko's eyes for only a second before letting his own dart away again, turning away and folding one arm across his chest, the other rubbing at his chin and mouth.

"Why were you afraid? Because I know why I'm afraid. I'm afraid because I'm not like you. You think my issue is that I'll hate myself if I do it? That's not it. It's that I know I can't do it. I can't. Ever. I can't hurt my own brother, he's all I got left, no matter what he turns into. Makes me sick to the stomach and hate myself, but I love him, and I can't."

"Because the last time Cal formed a gate and wasn't in control of himself, I had to put six inches of this sword into his stomach to stop him."

Niko rapped a fingertip against the sheathed blade, then perched on the corner of his desk. He didn't try to meet Dean's eyes, but for once he was as open as he was comfortable being outside of his small family. "I didn't think I could do it, but I would have lost him if I hadn't. He would have lived the rest of his life as the thing he'd fought against being for almost twenty years. I love my brother too much to do that to him. If we hadn't been able to save him, I'd have given everything to do him the mercy of a quick end."

He folded his hands around his knee and watched Dean closely for a reaction. "I think you know what it's like to be taken by evil and made to enjoy it, and I think you know how desperate someone can be for release from that."

The sound of the metal gathered Dean's attention to the present, focusing it away from the emotions twisting around like a betrayer snake in his gut, guilt and remorse for an act he's never committed but which he thinks he will, and had thought of doing many times before. Done before. Not only had he not killed his brother at any point since John Winchester's passing, he'd raised him from the dead. What right did Dean have to be resurrected. What right did he have to be around decent people.

And there was Niko, offering Dean words from what seemed to be an experience very close to the one he found himself in.

"I know what it's like. I know what it's like to get satisfaction out of being a sonnuvabitch and caring only about what you want, what you need. I know I'm still that person, deep inside. Like some kind of 'recovering' alcoholic. You never recover. You're always that person, you just learn better. Problem is, sometimes I think it wouldn't be so bad. Sam becoming what they intended him to be. Ruby don't think it's so bad, and the bitch of it is-- I know. I know one day I'll be what Ruby is. Could be a year. Could be a hundred years. But I'm gonna be what I kill. Is that fair? Do I deserve that?"

"I don't know." Seven years the junior, and there Niko was, giving the advice. "The City slipped one of your candies to me," he told Dean, a wry twist to his mouth. Only in the City would something as innocuous, as ridiculous as chalk-flavored sweets come attached to a brief tour of someone else's torture. He sobered as he continued. "It showed me what you did in Hell. I'm surprised at how well you're coping."

Niko felt a moment's gratitude that Cal had Rafferty's healing to hide behind. Dean didn't enjoy the same distance between him and his thoughts. "We're human. We wear out. We break down. It's how our species makes progress."

At twenty-three, Niko was too old. Like Dean he had done things contrary to his nature. He was given to fatalism in his own way, but he didn't like to see it as it was presented to him now. "Don't consign yourself to Ruby's existence so readily. There's usually a way out, given time and careful maneuvering. The so-called inevitable becomes malleable if you fight hard enough."

Dean shrugged his shoulders heavily, cupping his hands in his lap and finally looking back up at Niko with a sideways expression on his face, not guilty or cagey, but considering. He wondered if talking it out did any good, or if sharing any of this sort of thing with people, even here in the city, would just get them involved in ways Dean didn't want to think about or, Heaven forbid, watch.

"I don't know if you got a Hell proper where you come from. But it's like...it's made to eventually burn the humanity out of you. Figuratively and literally. Eventually they can't remember being human, and then they're like...animals. You can't blame them for acting on instinct. But I remembered. I just resented and I wanted my pound of flesh. I didn't do it 'cause they made me, I did it because I wanted to. I still want to. Now I have to live with it."

As if looking for something to occupy his body while he spoke, he stood and shoved his hands in his jacket pockets, staring down at Niko searchingly.

"I used to believe that the 'inevitable' was just as bullshit as you do. That I always had a choice to lay down or keep fighting, even if it was a losing battle in the end. Now we got...Castiel and the angels thrown in the mix, and maybe God or whatever, and some days I'm like...humans, man. I've got thousands to save to make up for what I've done, but look at me. I'm the evilest thing I know right now, and I'm human. Are humans worth fighting for? Or should I just take Sammy and try to run from it all?"

Niko stayed where he was, watching. Did he have answers for Dean? No. He could only say what he would do in a similar situation. Dean was right. He wasn't Niko. He might not be capable of making the decisions Niko had in the past or was prepared to make in the future.

"I tried running. It worked for a few years. We didn't leave a paper trail. We limited our contacts to what was necessary to keep us in rent, weapons and transportation. At the least sign of the Auphe, we'd move on. They caught up. That part, I don't believe we could have changed for the better. Our seer would have told us if we could. The best she could do was guide us to the outcome that caused the least damage.

"My answers aren't yours. I don't know if my world has Satan or God or literal Heaven and Hell, but the ones you and the others have described don't sound as though they'll let you run."

Dean froze utterly for a moment, before he began to pace, taking slow, deliberate steps. It wasn't that he disagreed with what Niko had to say. It was that he knew he agreed with it.

"I know I can't run. Dramatic, romantic notion or whatever, but I know that the actuality is, you can't run from the powers that be, you can't damn well run from a thing like Castiel and his brothers, that know everything about you and can see your past and, who knows, maybe your future. So what's left? Stand down or fight. Some days I want to stand down. I used to be full of piss and vinegar, but--" But Hell changes all that, Dean is pretty sure the gist can get through without the words being said. Saying it is admitting it. "Can't do it, though. Have to fight. Problem is, for which side? Well, for Sam's side, I guess. Just wish I knew what that meant."

Edited 2009-02-18 11:20 (UTC)

"It means you're his brother." That part of the equation had always been simple for Niko. Cal was the only family he had. He refused to abandon that connection.

"Sam is a good man. So are you." Niko stood, his hands in his pockets, looking no more dangerous than any other twenty-something professional. He preferred honesty, but he was good at hiding--knives, scars, how exhausting his life had been for the past five years. "Talk to him."

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Log: Ongoing

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