Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	fandom: supernatural, genre: gen, my fic

Supernatural Fic: Gen: Immaculate Conception and other Improbable Situations
Crossposted to spn_gen

Title: Immaculate Conception and other Improbable Situations.
Genre: Supernatural Fanon Gen - Dean, Sam, OFC, Castiel.
Pairing: None.
Rating: PG-13 for swearing.
Warnings: None, really. Unrepentantly schmoopy at the end.
Spoilers: Assumes knowledge of the end of Season 4.
Word count: 2700 words.
Disclaimer: Written for fun and as an excuse not to do homework. Don't sue me. Just fiction.
Summary: The knock on their motel room door came about four months after the apocalypse. Sammy was trying for the eighth time to get the kettle in the kitchenette they'd sprung for to work – long case and Sammy liked cooking, Dean liked having a fridge to store his beer – so it was Dean who opened the door to the heavily pregnant goth girl.

Author's notes: Thanks to salixbabylon, as ever, for the beta and for everything else. This was totally a brain hiccup, when it was written, but I have some further ideas in this direction.



The knock on their motel room door comes about four months after the apocalypse. Sammy is trying for the eighth time to get the kettle to work in the kitchenette they've sprung for – they‘re on a long case and Sammy likes cooking, while Dean likes having a fridge to store his beer – so it‘s Dean who opens the door to the heavily pregnant goth girl.

"Dean Winchester, I presume," she says icily, glaring at him from beneath long, mascara-laden lashes, like he's personally offended her. "Actually, at this point, I don't give a fuck. I'm pregnant; I need to pee. Get outta my way," and with that, Dean finds himself smashed into the doorframe as the girl barrels past and into the ensuite, slamming the door behind her.

"Who's that?" Sam asks, coming into the main part of the room while Dean gingerly closes the front door.

"Not sure," he replies. "It was either a pregnant lady or a small tank."

"What?" Sammy asks, but by then they can hear the water running in the bathroom, and it seems unneccessary to elaborate when the door slams open and the girl marches out.

She eyes Sam up and down, wrinkling her nose at him, before turning to Dean. "Your friends suck at descriptions," she says, still eyeing Sammy out of the corner of her eye. "And, come to think of it, oh, directions, too," she adds, rolling her eyes pointedly heavenward, before patting her big belly absently and looking around to find a place to sit down. Sammy makes a move to get her a chair from the kitchen, but she just cranks up her glare a bit and freezes him right in his tracks, and Dean thinks that this might be a useful trick to learn if they can ever get out of her what the hell she wants.

"What the hell?" Dean finally settles for asking, as the girl lowers herself onto the telephone bench. It gives an ominous groan under her weight, but holds.

"Yeah, that was my first thought, too," the girl says darkly, "but apparently that was looking in the wrong direction."

"What?" Sammy says, looking a little shell-shocked, and Dean would wager he looks just about the same.

The girl whips around to glare at Sam, then pointedly turns towards Dean and asks, "Is he safe to be around?"

"Is he..." Dean starts, while Sam just repeats his 'what' from earlier more emphatically.

"Well, considering the only description I have of Sam Winchester is 'His soul has been blackened by fornication with demons; he has been posessed by an unnatural force; he is the harbinger of evil and a bringer of death - oh and also he's kind of tall,' I think I can be excused for asking," the girl snaps.

Dean blinks.

"It was just the one demon," Sam says weakly from where he's retreated into the kitchenette doorway under the thundering recitation, and it figures he'd focus on that.

"Okay," Dean says slowly. The two of them had been on their way out to the local library this afternoon, but it seems like that trip is off for the time being. "Why don't we take it from the top? What the hell are you doing here?" He thinks for a moment, then adds, "And who ARE you?"

The girl glowers. "See, here's the part where I'd usually warn you that what I'm about to tell you is really weird, except you, Dean Winchester, are legally dead in three different states, two of them on separate sides of the country. Seeing as how you are bicoastally deceased, you're probably used to really fucking weird." She pats her heavily pregnant belly. "See, I'm a virgin."

+++

"Okay, Mary," Sammy says, using the calm, measured tone he usually applies to situations where he has one or more lethal weapons pointed at his person. Dean admires his steadiness; he himself has gone far beyond words and is at a point where it is remarkable that he's not sitting in the corner, rocking back and forth and sobbing to himself.

"So what you're saying is, you're carrying a child despite never having had sex, you're just about ready to deliver even if you only... uh, conceived, four months ago, and you've had an angelic visitation regarding the, uh..." Sammy looks deeply uncomfortable.

"I was told in no uncertain terms that the 'Lord would Provide'," Mary says, rolling her eyes. "Apparently, they meant 'The Lord will Provide some Amazing Breaks of Luck and Directions to the Winchesters.' Ha."

Dean squirms. Sam can't stop looking at Mary's baby bump.

"Anyway," the girl says, morosely, "I can't raise a kid. I wasn't planning on getting pregnant – no sex, remember? – I'm in art school. Fuck, I lied to my parents that I got a year's scholarship to do work-study in Florida just so that I could find you guys, because the damn angels didn't give me a freaking choice."

"They never do," Dean mutters, annoyed. "Why did they want you to come see us, anyway? They must've got plenty of God-fearing folks to help out the latest Virgin Mary better than us."

"Yeah, that's where it gets interesting," Mary says. "Apparently kiddo here," she pats the bump, "is kind of an old friend of yours."

+++

"Dear Dean," the letter Mary hands him reads. "Some wounds can not be healed. Sometimes, as you'd say, you've got to start over."

Crap.

"His final act was to give you a chance." it goes on. "Now it's your turn to return the favour, until he's old enough to choose in which world he wants to walk. He would be welcome back among us, if he so chooses."

"Take good care of him,
-A."

"She also gave me this," Mary says, holding something between her fingers that gives off an iridescent sheen, making the room glow with soft light, and before he knows it, Castiel's Grace is dangling from Dean's fingers. The angels sure know how to lay on one hell of a guilt-trip.

"Christ," Sam says reverently from beside him.

"Yeah," Mary says acidly. "My thoughts exactly."

+++

The Apocalypse hadn't been an event; it had been a progression: from the final Seal being broken to Lucifer's rising, to Sam's possession then eventual redemption, Dean remembers it as a long, long battle, fought on the edges of the world. In the end, the battle wasn't won, as such: it was more correct to talk about a cessation of hostilities, an armistice – an armed armistice, which is why Dean and Sam are still trawling the country dealing with the fallout – Lucifer had been contained, and somehow the credit for that has to go mostly to the dark side; Heaven had gotten off its high horse, and the credit for that was due mostly to the good side. In the end, the greatest casualties of the Apocalypse had come from civil wars on either side.

In the end, everybody decided to just accept that there were shades of gray to things, and move on.

The last time Dean had seen Castiel, it had been when Castiel held off the Hosts of Heaven so that Dean could find Sam and exorcise Lucifer from his body. It was the beginning of the end of the Apocalypse, though they couldn't have known that at the time, and Castiel had looked annoyed and tired and stretched out further than he could easily go, obfuscating the retreat of Dean and the two fallen angels in his company who were planning the end of the Morning Star.

"For the love of God, Dean, go," was the last thing Castiel had said to him, and Dean had gotten into the car and gone, just like Castiel told him.

Everything was over just a week later, the ashes of the war still smoldering, everybody still licking their wounds and nursing their dented prides, not in the least the Hosts of Heaven. Dean was aware that Angel Management would be working a little differently from now on, so he hadn't really thought much about Castiel; he'd actually assumed that since his own personal angel had turned out to be more or less right about everything, the other angels might be looking to him for guidance.

Dean was furious at himself now for the assumption, furious that he hadn't asked - nevermind that there wasn't anybody likely to give him any straight answers. Dean had spent a week in the company of the Fallen, he knows how to summon and contain an angel, he should have...

He stares at Mary's baby bump, utterly lost, and doesn't know what to do.

+++

In the end, they do the only thing to be done when dealing with an immaculate conception, the impending arrival of a bundle of joy/ex-angel and a hunt they can't possibly finish now.

Bobby picks up on the fifth ring.

"What?" he barks into the phone. He'd harbored some notions about retiring after the Apocalypse was done – once you've averted the Apocalypse, the excitement goes out of hunting, at least according to Bobby – but considering the fact that Bobby had been there, from the beginning to the end, and that after the Apocalypse there were a lot of new hunters starting out, Dean guesses he isn't having a restful time, and is grudgingly loving every minute of it.

There's a long silence on the line after Dean has explained their dilemma. "Bobby?" he finally asks, uncertain.

"Um," Bobby says. He sounds a little weird.

"Are you okay, dude?" Dean asks.

"Yeah, uh, yeah, fine," Bobby says. He sounds kind of... strangled.

"Are you laughing?" Dean asks suspiciously.

"No," Bobby says, and Dean can hear him swallowing a fucking giggle through the phone. "No, son, not laughing at all. Um. Why don't you come on out here and bring the young lady? I'll... make arrangements – I know a good midwife, don't ask me how." He's clearly trying to get back to gruff and failing abysmally.

"Okay," Dean says. "Thanks, Bobby."

"Don't mention it," Bobby says. Dean can hear him start to laugh hysterically before the line clicks off.

Great.

+++

"You can't call him Castiel," Mary says from the back seat of the Impala. She's painting her toenails, contorting herself into improbable positions to get at them around her enormous belly, and Dean has swallowed about six hundred protests about his upholstery.

He does have manners. You don't berate the possible mother of the Messiah, even if she spills electric blue nailpolish on the vinyl.

"Why not?" Dean asks, happy to be distracted from the destruction of his car.

"I don't know as much about this as you two," Mary says, "but the way Anna spoke, I think the guy is getting... I don't know, a second chance? Maybe just the experience of being a human. Feeling, growing, all that shit. I mean, he's never going to be a normal kid – I mean, for one, he's growing pretty damn fast, second, I got the impression he'll be able to remember being an angel when he's ready to, or something like it – but... from what I gathered, angels aren't used to knowing what it's like to be human. And I don't know about you guys, but considering nobody asked me if I wanted to get immaculately knocked up, I'm thinking we could use an angel who understands us little people, if that's what he decides to do. When he's grown up." She looks pensievely at her stomach and Dean knows that regardless of her protestations about leaving them in the dust once she's popped the kid out, that's not what she's going to do, eventually.

"So, you're saying we should... give him the full experience?" Sam asks.

"Look," Mary says, quietly. "I've got no idea why I was chosen for this particular destiny. I'm not religious, I support abortion rights, I think the Church is a hoax. I'm, like, the last person on the docket for Immaculate shenanigans. But the way Anna spoke about you, and... the way I feel he feels... I know why you were chosen. He trusted you to do this. So yeah."

'No pressure or anything,' Dean thinks to himself, but even if he'll never admit it to another soul, there's a warm glow in his stomach and a spark of pride in his heart at the idea that Castiel wanted him, of all people, to take care of him while he was vulnerable.

There is an uncomfortable silence in the car for a while, before Dean thinks of a way to break it. "You know, Mary, I think I know why they picked you. After two thousand years of generic Christianity, you're going to be a kickass image on all the altarpieces."

+++

It takes them a day longer to get to Bobby's than they'd anticipated. This is mostly due to someone's propensity for stepping on someone else's bladder, necessitating an average of one pitstop per hour.

It doesn't matter that much. Mary settles into Bobby's nicest guestroom, Bobby banishes all the New Hunters to live in the barn, and Dean and Sam pack out their duffles into the closet of their room.

Mary and the midwife – a middle aged lady named Susan who's terrifying, and that's saying something with all the things Dean's seen – tend to hold loud discussions in the kitchen or the living room about men, their general uselessness, pregnancy, and the utter wrongness of imagining there's anything immaculate about it. Bobby, Sam and Dean tend to slink around the house during those conversations, not looking each other in the eyes.

They haven't spoken about it much, but they've spoken about it enough. Bobby's place used to be a ranch, and there's a farmhand house out by the creek that needs fixing up, but will do nicely once they've done some work on it. It's far enough away that they won't be censoring each other, close enough that they can share the things they'd like to share. It'll give them a place to stay, and still let them hunt. The Singer Salvage Yard will benefit from an extra mechanic, and Sammy has some plans involving something on the computer.

It's a ferociously hot week and they're all lethargic and tired, so when Dean wakes up one afternoon on the sofa, it's nothing unusual. Until he hears the screaming.

He's barely aware of where he is when he bursts into Mary's room, gun held high, knife held by his hip and Mary stares at him, sweaty, hair tangled, her legs up. Susan the midwife is there too, bustling about, and it takes him a few minutes to process. Before he can make a run for it, Mary holds out a hand, and in the end he takes it, lets her crush his hand in hers as she fights to bring another life into the world, and while he wouldn't want to be standing on the other side of the sheet that's modestly draped over Mary's knees, there's something about being here that's magical. Sammy peeks inside, Bobby behind him, and Dean snarls at them to "go boil some water, make yourselves useful," which is apparently some sort of an ingrained reflex because hell if Dean knows where it came from.

And then Mary, squeezing his fingers until the tips are blue, pushes one last time, and there's a baby crying in the room. 'Jesus Christ, a baby,' Dean thinks, and then laughs at himself for being accidentally appropriate.

"It's a baby boy," Susan says. "Blue eyes, ten fingers, ten toes. Congratulations."

Which is how Dean, somehow, ends up with an armful of infant, wrapped in a blue fluffy blanket. The kid has stopped screaming and is now observing the world with an air of imperviousness that most people shouldn't develop until they're at least sixty. He's got startlingly blue eyes, that hasn't changed, but the shock of hair on his head is a dark blonde and holy shit, he is holding a tiny person.

"You're a natural," Susan says, but Dean barely hears her. Mary smiles at him, looking radiantly happy, but she doesn't reach for the baby and Dean is fiercely glad, because he's not sure he could give him back if she asked.

"Hi, kid," he says huskily, brushing the boy's hair back, kissing his forehead and whispering, "Hi, David. Welcome to the world."